Humanoid

Given how much the original Wing Commander demanded of a 286, have to say I'm amazed it could run Privateer at all.

The laptop I'm typing this on hasn't been able to render any 3D graphics without breaking into random grey artifacts for about two year now, but no problems whatsoever in 2D. Last card I had fail put green pixels all over the place in 2D even fresh after a cold boot. In the former case it's almost assuredly the GPU core, but the latter I think is likely symptomatic of failing graphics memory. I recall that you water-cool your system, so perhaps it's possible the failures are due to inadequate VRAM cooling (assuming your waterblock covers the GPU only)? Individual RAMsinks without direct airflow over them?

Managed to hurt my back sleeping funny, so spent the afternoon with a couple movies, one catching up to something I never got around to, and the other catching up on something the filmmakers never got around to. Repo Man, Alex Cox's sort-of-sci-fi, sort-of-dystopic, sort-of-punk-comedy. To be honest, I can't say I "got" it, or that I "got" the supposed political overtones in it (something about Reagan-mumble-mumble), but that wasn't necessary to the enjoyment of just sitting back and watching the leads, Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez, shake, nay, blow the dust off the bleak urban setting. Soul Power, the documentary-slash-concert-film of the famous soul festival in Kinshasa, Zaire - featuring the likes of B.B. King, Bill Withers, the Pointer Sisters, and of course, James Brown - that preceded the legendary Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle". filmed in 1974 but not released until 2008 due to various lawyery stuffs. I'm not a fan of soul music but love my concert films, so not sure how I would take this. Significantly more talky bits than I had expected, but perhaps for that reason I liked it more than I expected. Ali gets a fair bit of face time, naturally.

I'd take a new Star Wars RPG over nothing, but I'd take almost any new non-Star Wars RPG over that, so eh. In the context of Obsidian at least, I'd rather see them have room to flex their creative muscle rather than don the straitjacket that is the Star Wars licence.

Obviously it is your destiny to remain forevermore with integrated graphics.

Wasn't there some controversy when it got released? Something about only a censored version being available in the US (sort of a "reverse" fallout 2 stunt, where Europeans got the gimped version) Mermaid bra and green blood. Not sure about the specific version in each region - it was apparently trivial to circumvent anyway, but I don't recall what version my Australian bundled copy (with a Sound Blaster Audigy) was.

I'd go with a tower cooler if overclocking the CPU, generally an easy job. For GPUs is a bit more fiddly, but personally I can't stand the blower-style stock coolers. RAM cooling is usually irrelevant, my memory of choice would be the Samsung 1.25V "magic" RAM, which doesn't even have a heatspreader - but regardless, try to avoid the tall heatsinks on memory because they tend to block installation of CPU coolers.

Yeah, even in the "worst" case scenario (in terms of power demands) if FO4 ends up on the next gen consoles instead of the current competitors, it's doubtful there'd be any big leap in requirements. Additional notes: - A high-end motherboard doesn't really give the average gamer anything - make sure you actually need the extra features they provide. Mid-range boards are usually a better bet, what they have over the entry level is usually better power circuitry and SLI support (the cheaper models usually only support Crossfire). - Memory speed is largely irrelevant, latencies especially so - while memory frequency only makes a real impact when using integrated graphics. That said, the price gap up to DDR1866 is usually pretty small as well. - The primary cons of SLI/Crossfire, aside from cost, are initial compatibility issues with new release games and the phenomenon known as microstutter, where some people who are more sensitive may notice fluctuating time between consecutive frames. I'd say avoid it until it becomes necessary due to unsatisfactory current performance.

Generally speaking, trying to futureproof/anticipate future requirements isn't a reliable science, and whenever possible it's best to just wait for the time you actually need the upgrade to do the upgrade - the best value outcome is almost invariably from going down that path. However if you must get something around now, it's simple enough: i5, 8/16GB, and one of 7950/7970/670/680. Given the ubiquity of loading screens in prior Bethesda games, I'd guess an SSD would be very helpful too. As for what's coming, there's been no announcement yet from either of the GPU vendors about timelines for their next product. Intel's next-gen Haswell CPU arrives mid-year and is expected to deliver fairly modest gains in CPU performance, but while of no interest to serious gamers just yet, the biggest leap it makes is likely to be in its integrated graphics.

Not seeing that trend either - always noted larger SSDs are equal or faster at everything, all else being equal. Samsung 840 as an example. And aside, I've just bought a 256GB 830 for my aging notebook, so it better be faster.

Slightly confusing naming scheme but the 840 Pro > 830 > 840. Not a 4TB SSD as such, but a 4TB array of SSDs should only cost about $3000. Mmmmm.....

Well there was the incident, think it was with that Vertex 2, in which they switched to a slower NAND - on a smaller node to save costs - without telling anyone. To add insult to injury, changes to overprovisioning meant it had reduced capacity as well. It was only found out when users found speeds were significantly below those in prior reviews and did some digging to get to the bottom of it. Not so much a technical issue as much as business ethics.

RAM (and PSUs) you can just rebrand, but SSD controllers are in a completely different league, and to an extent it's not unfair to say that OCZ's engineers have been coming up a bit short in that regard. Still, we need to keep the big picture in mind in saying that one is still far more likely to not notice any problems no matter what product you pick - the scale of any issue is still far smaller than say, the notorious IBM Deathstars.

Spider Solitaire could be considered a new release if you count the Win8 version of it.

Damn those humans and their lack of respect for reaper intellectual property!

The links were to a PNY reference-cooler 670 and a Windforce 7950. For what it's worth, looked through all the 670s on NCIX and the cheapest ones with custom coolers are the $330 MSI and the $340 Gigabyte. EDIT: The Windforce 7950 is $280 for comparison, and while there's a $260 XFX one with a custom cooler, I've heard disappointing reports of the XFX custom design. EDIT2: Looking at Newegg, their 670 pricing is rubbish so the candidates appear to be the Gigabyte 7950 from NCIX for $280 (after rebate, no bundle?*), the Sapphire 7950 from Newegg for $290 (after rebate, bundled games) and the Gigabyte 7950 from Newegg for $300 (no rebate, bundled games). * While there's no note on the item listing on NCIX, a googling of "Never settle bundle NCIX" does show that they're part of the scheme, so I'm not sure whether it's active for the particular card or not - might be worth contacting them to see whether that's the case.

No experience with stores on that side of the pond so no idea how that kind of thing works normally - there's no real culture of vendor cashbacks or coupon options over here. Pretty hard to say no to three new release games for $10 of course.

Yeah - not a fan of the stock reference "blower" type coolers from either nV or AMD. That Gigabyte custom cooler is a pretty good one, as far as factory-installed ones go.

Only one real choice at $300, and that's a HD7950 as the competitor product at the same price point is a fair bit behind. If you're inclined towards nVidia then the only realistic option is ponying up another ~$50 for a GTX670, which performs much the same, so less value but can be argued for.

I'm not familiar with much FR stuff myself, but I know that the first release was the "grey box" edition, and so a quick googling of what's purportedly the map that came with that edition reveals it's been there since that first commercial release - http://www.mimbral.c.../9279/frmap.jpg As to when Greenwood introduced it into his campaign ....well. EDIT: Ninjaed.

Is it possible that all the (minor) issues are just smoke and mirrors and that the problem was that they had judged your wife from day one due to her background as a showgirl (amongst other things)? Followed then by ten years of actively trying to find faults because of that pre-judgement? I say this because of your comment about bible verses and such - while not necessarily an indicator of their conservatism or even prudishness, it may be that the deck was loaded from the start.

After the first month or two of "oh shiny new stuff", Alien Crossfire is something I always put away for the occasional novelty game. Finally getting to play Righteous Fire again on the other hand without my CD is great. Sale's been slim pickings this time around though due to essentially having all that I genuinely want - heck, I was even thinking about picking up outright rubbish like MM9 due to there being nothing else that drew my eye. Might pick up the Daedalic pack which is today's special due to the various posts praising Deponia above, but no idea what the other stuff in the pack is about.

I never had a 3dfx card, my first 3D accelerator was actually an nVidia, heh - their first serious effort, the Riva128, which replaced my S3 VirgeDX. It was faster than a Voodoo1, but made some terrible tradeoffs in terms of image quality, most noticeable in the primitive dithering of greys, which looked mostly like white with black pepper applied to it. Fortunately they managed to turn it around, and with the TNT/2, overtook 3dfx by virtue of doing 32-bit colour just about as fast as the Voodoo3 could do 16-bit colour. Also on topic, and by a sort of coincidence, I see the Antec ISK300/310 case that I want is also out of stock in most reputable stores. Am in no rush to build my miniITX system since I have other ongoing projects (such as building two road bikes) but I did want to try to get the parts while I'm on holidays in Melbourne.

One factor in the loyalty of a non-trivial subset of customers is likely whether they were affected by nVidia's "bumpgate" - an systematic engineering flaw to do with thermal cycling that took a good while to be fixed (or even admitted to) that caused a large range of their chips to degrade and fail unusually fast. I had a 7900GT fail in this manner, and a similar-generation notebook GPU that would have almost certainly suffered the same fate (based on reports from owners of the same chip) if that notebook wasn't stolen. This problem also spawned the vaguely comedic, but effective notion that you could bake your video cards in the oven to fix them. It did sort of work as a stopgap, restoring function for a few months at a time perhaps, if you were comfortable with the idea of having toxic chemicals at high temperatures sitting in your oven. Fortunately there's been no problems of that magnitude for either vendor since then, a good 4-5 years ago now, so fairly comfortable going either way. Personally I weigh price:performance but the price side of the equation is inclusive of third party cooling since I'm yet to find factory cooling I would remotely label as satisfactory in terms of noise in any recent product.

Christmas means my semi-annual trip back to Melbourne to see family. Not so much for the occasion itself, but because unlike me, they don't tend to have flexible holidays that we can sync up any other time of the year. Typically a shopping trip on the 27th to get belated (and frequently silly) Christmas presents - we're all the type to avoid crowds - and besides that, not much due to the typical 35-45C degree days around this time of year. Some classic movies, multiplayer console games, that kind of thing mostly. No specific foods we associate with Christmas - except maybe some stollen - I'm guessing it'll be probably something like a regular BBQ for dinner on Christmas day. Oh, parents will probably go to the church service in the morning while I sleep in - they're mildly devout Christians, I'm not religious, and my siblings are somewhere in between. It's never something that gets in the way in any situation, fortunately.