Humanoid

That's probably only true because there's less wear from twice as many things being used half as often. The best Blu-ray writers at the moment are also measurably the best DVD and CD writers in terms of burn quality and reliability.

Probably easier in lands where you have larger markets and where distributors and retailers gouge you less for exclusivity arrangements and such. Me, I use a CC a lot for ordering bike parts from the UK (which is often a 50% saving or more compared to buying locally), and sometimes PC parts from the US. All tax-free for values under $1000AUD to boot. I can import an Intel SSD for slightly over $300AUD - which includes an extortionate $50 or so delivery. Locally however, retailers are asking for $450-500AUD, so you can understand the extent of this price gouging. :| Likewise, I've just bought a pair of bike tyres from the UK for $45AUD each from the UK, with free delivery. The local retailer wants $120 each.

DVD drive prices are only just starting to recover after a big price spike midyear (allegedly one of the major component manufacturers closed/burned down), but they'll probably never get as cheap as they were a year ago ever again. Bad news is that in the meantime, Pioneer discontinued their inhouse manufacturing of the drives, so the current model Pioneers are no longer the clear cut best choice anymore. And yeah, the Sony-NEC is probably one of the better drives on the market now (not the pre-NEC ones though).

This is the main point of contention really, the investigation after that collision was pretty damning about her level of underpreparedness. Something about falling asleep in the middle of one of the country's busiest shipping lanes, and failing to set up the equipment that should be providing alerts that, you know, there's a big huge cargo ship on a collision course with your dinghy. I'd have no problems with anyone doing this who is demonstrably fit to do so, but this particular case seems to be asking for trouble.

Yeah, games keep detecting my Sound Blaster AWE32 as a Sound Blaster Pro. As for Far Cry, I think my old X1950XT video card came with a voucher for it. I never bothered redeeming it....

I derived more entertainment reading the anti-walkthrough than from the game itself, but that required the game to exist in the first place. So another plus point there.

I can't identify the power supply from the photo, but if it's a generic one you might be best served getting a better quality one, which generally would come with longer cables anyway.

GT300 mass availability won't be until Q1 2010 at the earliest, so waiting not viable for a current build. Since the proposed system is an i7, it will be running on the Intel X58/P55 so Crossfire is going to be available no matter what. Whether SLI is available officially varies by the specific motherboard model, although many cheaper ones are perfectly capable of SLI despite not being certified for it (and consequently you won't be provided with the required SLI bridge with the board). Bear in mind however some of the cheapest P55 motherboards can only run the second PCI-E slot at 4x, if you're determined to go with a multi-card solution, pick a P55 board that runs the second slot at 8x, or an X58 board that runs both at 16x. That said, between a multi-GPU and a single-GPU solution, I would always advocate choosing the latter (given sufficient performance, and the R58xx most certainly fulfils that criterion); for a number of reasons including but not limited to: 1) Scaling issues in multi-GPU setups - the performance gain you get from adding the second card is not really predictable and can vary dramatically depending on the application it's running 2) Logistics of setup and added complexity when trying to diagnose any problems which may occur 3) Power consumption/heat (and potentially reliability issues as a consequence) 4) Expense, not only in the initial outlay, but in having to retire two cards at the same time eventually. Summary of the broadly available performance mid-range options, from low to highest: GTS250 / R4850 / R5750 - I consider this the baseline for a budget gaming system. Between these, the GTS250 is the oldest tech, being essentially a rebadged 8800GT from circa 2007. The R4850 was the entry-level gaming champion for a good while and after rebates and such can still work out to be the best value in price-performance terms. However the newly released R5750 is probably now a clear winner, by hitting the same general price point (same RRP) and offering all the new-fangled current tech. R5770 / GTX260 / R4870 / GTX275 / R4890 - Performing in roughly that order (but dependent on application), these are the midrange options. Note while the R5770 is relatively costly in context of its absolute performance, it's the only one in this range that supports DX11, and may have greater scope for improvement with new driver releases since it's the newest. R5850 / GTX285 - The ATi card here is marginally faster and a fair bit cheaper, making it generally the better buy, unless one desires the exclusive nVidia features (PhysX, 3D glasses) over DX11 support (and Eyefinity). R5870 / GTX295 - The GTX295 is basically two GTX275s and comes with the same caveats as that card, in addition to the multi-GPU issues aforementioned. It's also quite a bit dearer, although in absolute terms it is generally a bit faster.

Headliners for me, but stuff everyone would already have anyway (and excluding previously mentioned titles): HoMM3 IL-2 Sturmovik And the miscellaneous pile: Beneath A Steel Sky Capitalism Pro Pinball (I'm bored with the free Windows one) Seven Kingdoms (can't remember if the sequel was any good) Lords of Magic Republic Oddworld and er... Battle Chess?

XFX's main selling point isn't the card itself (it's identical to any other manufacturer's), but what they call "double lifetime" warranty - that is, lifetime warranty for you, and transferrable should you decide to sell it (which means it has higher resale value than equivalent brands). North America only, so I've never been able to consider it a selling point personally. Nothing wrong with Sapphire as far as I know, of all vendors they've been in the "red team" longer than any - in the old days, the ATi branded cards were actually made by Sapphire (and I suspect Alan's present card would be).

Even a 8x slot will drop hardly any performance, it's in the single figure range in terms of percentage.

My agenda would be more to use the SW licence to push a genre I want revived, rather than wanting a Star Wars game per se. A new space sim, graphic adventure or turn based tactical game with the SW label glued on would do me just fine.

I've heard anecdotal reports of people running ok in XP (though performance might be suboptimal), not sure if it required the 9.10 beta drivers. Alternatively, have you looked into Win7's XP mode to see if it would be suitable for you?

The G31 is a desktop chipset, and it looks like two HDDs, each partitioned into two. Quick look at the Intel site shows the DG31PR motherboard is a microATX board, could even be in a HTPC. But it has a PCI-E x16 slot so there'd be no real problems upgrading here. It'll also take any LGA775 CPU you care to throw at it so you can potentially upgrade the CPU to a Q9400 or a E8500 or somesuch (might require a BIOS update) While 2.2GHz Conroe derivative isn't really all that bad (my geriatric old E6300 has a stock clock of only 1.86GHz), I'm not really familar with modern FPS games, although I'd expect them to be almost always GPU-limited these days. A mild overclock on the CPU might convince the game to run? As for potential upgrades: R4850 can be had for under $100USD. Even if the launcher doesn't complain about what you have now (probably because it hasn't gotten to checking the GPU after failing the first check), you won't run the game with your current graphics setup. While it's possible to get something even cheaper here, the performance gap will be rather large, hence spending more is better value in this case. As for any CPU upgrades, any Intel Qxxxx (quad-core) or Exxxx (dual-core) will run, just pick a price point you're happy with since the range is huge.

Well now that the 5870 is out of the way, the 5850 is out for the more sensible people. Good news even if you're fervently opposed to ever buying ATi as it's going to force cascading price drops across the entire nVidia range. $100 drop in GTX285 (now utterly obsolete at its current price point) incoming?

More effective in increasing the vulnerability quotient would be to not give the player a gun in the first place.

Well EA are experts at that, they've had two decades of practice.

Hopefully there won't be any problems fitting an Accelero S1 or similar cooler, disappointing they couldn't improve at all on the previous iteration of the stock cooler.

Not a bad time to be looking for a new system - doing so myself - there's a nicely timed confluence of new tech releases that are genuinely practical for once. The Lynnfield platform (i5/i7 P55), second generation SSDs (Intel G2, Indilinx), 80+ Gold certified PSUs (Seasonic X series), ATi 5xxx GPUs (this week), and what looks to be a relatively smooth new OS release in Win7. I've had an Antec P182 case sitting unused in its box for a year now, which I rushed out to buy when it were being discontinued in favour of the uglier P183. That was before I found out only the new non-standard PSU housings would only fit in the new cases. Hindsight, yeah....

I'll avoid the console holy wars right now. In terms of TV selection, I've just bought a Samsung B650 series LCD and am pretty pleased with it. General reviews seem to show Samsung ever so slightly ahead of Sony (Z5500) in terms of display quality for LCDs and those two are the current market leaders, but the inbuilt speakers are pretty poor. Ignore the TVs marketed as 'LED,' they're just plain LCD TVs but with LED backlights instead of standard CFL backlights. Plasma remains a very viable option even though conventional wisdom recommends against them for gaming. LCDs are getting closer but still can't beat Plasmas for deep blacks. Risk of permanent damage from burn-in is now fairly negligible with current generation plasmas, but some image retention will still occur - e.g. you might come home from work and find that for a couple of hours you can still see the silhouette of some game's HUD because your kid left the game paused and walked away for a few hours during the day. Pioneer have unfortunately pulled out of the plasma market, however their TVs are still best-in-class if you can find any stock still around. Both Samsung and Panasonic are about a generation behind here. Samsung has the edge in colour reproduction and ambient light tolerance, while Panasonic has the better blacks and better inbuilt speakers. I'd say Samsung for general use but Panasonic for serious movie watching (in darkened rooms). For serious Blu-ray viewing, the Oppo BD-83 is a clear pick ahead of any other mainstream player I'd say.

10000rpm HDDs are pretty much obsoleted by SSDs which cost pretty much the same. Is an SSD worth it? Yes, it's going to make a far bigger difference than upgrading anything else in your system and I'd recommend one in any serious gaming system these days (indeed, in any system). Install your OS and games on it, and go for a low-speed HDD for your media files, etc. (i.e. a 5400rpm one like the Samsung F2 or WD Green) Aside, the new i7 860 has just been released at a similar price point as the 920 (and cheaper overall once you include the rest of the platform) and performs somewhere in between a 920 and a 950.

I did link a GPU cooler, and yes, it's compatible with the R4850.

Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 (rev 2) is a few years old but still better than anything else out there. Can potentially run passive with good case airflow but I'd cable-tie a 120mm slow fan onto it personally (such as a Scythe Slipstream 800/1200rpm).

I'm on target towards maintaining a one post per year average apparently.

The two blocks of two are generally configured for dual channel operation. The general idea is to have each 'block' set up identically - e.g. the 512+0, 512+0 that you had originally. So the ideal upgrade path would've meant getting two new, identical sticks and putting them in the empty slots (e.g. 512+1G, 512+1G). In the bigger picture though, it's still a worthwhile upgrade you've gotten, so there's no real reason to worry about it.