Humanoid

I prefer the theory that skipping Windows 9 was because of all the potential issues with applications looking for the "Windows 9*" string when trying to figure out what OS they're running on. My reasons for going with Win10 are more pragmatic. DX12 isn't just coming, it's already here, and has tangible advantages over older APIs. I don't discount any of the concerns about what Win10 does with regard to privacy and control of you own machine, but apart from doing my best to mitigate its problems, I can't pretend that my machine isn't made for gaming first and foremost. It's the same rationale for something like Steam for example. Yeah, some people avoid it outright, but even the majority of people who dislike it choose to tolerate it because it's the price of playing the games you want to play. As for the day to day user experience, the differences are so small as to not be a deciding factor at all. It doesn't change how I do things, and that's how it should be.

Completed my ghetto speaker stands. To be honest, it's kinda scary, as if one day they'll collapse and crush me, but at least my positional audio will no longer be stupidly out of whack. Fortunately I remembered my high school maths and the stands are reasonably balanced, and the speakers are secured with Blu-tack for that extra peace of mind.

If your "upgrade" last year was for the full release version of Win10, and the installation was properly activated, then your system is already registered with Microsoft as being licenced for Windows 10. This means you are free to upgrade or clean install Win10 whenever you like on your current machine, the deadline is irrelevant. If you're unsure whether you did it properly last time around, it may be a good idea to go ahead and upgrade now, ensure Win10 is activated, then rollback to Win7 if desired. This applies to anyone still on the fence about it. It's a bit of a hassle sure, but you'll need to do it eventually, even if it's a few years down the track, the two main reasons being discontinuation of support, and DirectX 12. EDIT: To be clear, when you do the upgrade, Microsoft will store the ID of your motherboard on their database. You will therefore be able to freely install Win10 from now until forever on that particular motherboard. The licence is not transferrable, so the only reason to not at least upgrade temporarily is that if you're 100% sure you will no longer be using that particular motherboard by the time Win10 becomes effectively mandatory. (Win7 support is due to cease in 2020)

US-based owners of the GTX 970 will shortly be able to claim $30 back from nVidia who have lost the class-action lawsuit regarding the whole 3.5GB VRAM kerfuffle.

So after finishing the game about a week ago, I have now learned that there is an option to lock the minimap orientation. Goddammit.

Worth noting that the 4GB cards, out of the box, have a lower memory speed than the 8GB variants. Given that the actual memory chips are identical, you'll be able to easily overclock them to the same stock speeds as the 8GB cards at the very least. Most reviews will not be doing so however, so you can add a few percent onto the benchmark scores for a more accurate representation of likely performance.

The most important game released in 1996 was the Tamagotchi, obviously.

In my few hours with Bravely Default, playing with random encounters off (I so hate that mechanic) was clearly not possible. Playing with halved encounter rate, I ended up in a slog of a boss battle that took 20 minutes and all my consumables. No surprise then that I firmly decided after tutorial island that this game wasn't for me. My last 'proper' JRPG before that was FF7 and I have no real recollection of how much I did or didn't grind there. Stretching the definition of JRPG a bit, Fire Emblem likely requires some grinding to unlock the child missions. While you could argue that these are equivalent to sidequests and therefore don't count, in a strategy game you'd typically want to play each included map at least once. Ignoring these missions would be like never seeing a full third of the maps in XCOM, for example, and new maps are always the thing I want most.

Got my Asus MG279Q finally. For now I'm just going with a triple 27" landscape setup, with the FreeSync monitor centre. I've set up FreeSync and it's working well enough with The Witcher 3 and it's definitely an improvement since the game generally runs below 60fps on my setup, making it the prime case for the technology. On the other hand, it's certainly a matter of compromise - I can definitely tell it's a monitor with lesser build quality than the Dell Ultrasharp range, even though it ended up costing more. It's inferior in terms of build quality, the bezels are relatively thick for a display of this age, the interface has some usability issues (the buttons are infuriatingly placed at the back of the screen making them very hard to access in a multi-screen setup), there are a bunch of gimmicky image enhancement options, and most importantly image quality. For something like general web browsing for instance, text has a subtle but annoying blur to it, almost as if the screen has a thin sheen of Vaseline over it, and once calibrated it still doesn't quite match the colours of the Dells. (I had to turn brightness down from 100 to 20-odd, but the white point was actually pretty good out of the box) There's also one dead pixel, though at least it's near a corner. In the end, due to a lack of alternatives available on the market, it's a compromise I'll need to live with for now (Acer have a similar model, no doubt using the same panel). Would I buy this screen again given the choice? I think I might have opted to wait it out until a better panel for general desktop use was released. OLED where art thou? P.S. There was an expired redemption coupon for Assassin's Creed Unity on UPlay included. I count that as a bullet dodged.

It can be very much a slog, yes. Typically in the first month I would take 4 or 5 rookies to each mission (probably 4 for UFOs) and make sure I have at least one shotgun to deal with the Outsiders. A sawn-off shotgun on a Scout makes a lot of sense too. Flashbangs are gold against them because they have disgustingly high aim otherwise. Fortunately though, unlike XCOM 2, rookies at point blank range have 100% chance to hit, and it makes a huge difference. The most important thing though is identify where it is before activation, using the audio cues and tile-scanning with the cursor, and by doing so you can often set up a breach where you're in a position to kill it on the move it activates. P.S. While Normal is the minimum difficulty selectable, combining it the 'Cinematic Mode' Second Wave option is essentially the Easy difficulty, which simply adds 15% to your hit chances. There are also more 'hidden' easier difficulty levels, which are enabled by replacing the DefaultGameCore.ini file in the XEW/Config directory with the DefaultGameCore - Training.ini.

Doubt we'll hear a peep about the 1080Ti until AMD launches Vega in about six months' time.

Hmm, that's really weird actually. The 1060 is losing a fair bit of performance running under Vulkan, which makes no sense as the 1070 and 1080 are both faster under Vulkan than OGL. Unless it's something to do with the memory bandwidth, you'd imagine it'd be something that'll be fixed in time. Aside, Asus custom 480 is out, but it's likely not going to be one of the better custom versions because Asus, no doubt as a cost-cutting measure, use essentially the same cooler for their AMD cards as they do for their nVidia cards, leading to poor contact. Sapphire is launching later today I believe, and presumably will do a better job since they only produce AMD cards. And for a bit of comic relief, here's a snippet from PowerColor's press release announcing their custom model:

It depends on the benchmark suite each reviewer uses, and paying attention to the selection of titles each uses is instructive. The biggest red flag would probably be using OpenGL Doom, considering both vendors get a boost from Vulkan. Objectively there's no reason to benchmark either card in OpenGL, except to introduce deliberate bias. That said, the overall consensus is fairly close to the mark, the 1060 is about 5-10% faster in DX11, but generally slower in DX12/Vulkan. It's close enough in terms of both absolute price and absolute performance that anyone who buys either because of brand loyalty isn't being ripped off. One thing to keep an eye on is that the custom 1060 models don't seem to get much of a boost over reference at all, whereas custom 480s are looking a decent improvement over the poor reference cards. On the other hand, custom 1060s aren't carrying a price premium over reference, while custom 480s are, to the point where the prices will probably end up the same. So the best advice would be to look for the head-to-head custom vs custom benchmarks and proceed from there. Wouldn't be surprised if the DX11 gap disappears, which would be fair enough if the cards were priced the same.

Sandisk Ultra II for 180EUR on Amazon France. Pricing like this is why I feel building an all-SSD machine is fully viable these days even for mid-range machines.

The 960 still sold like hotcakes despite being an objectively poor deal on the price-performance front. Even assuming those numbers are representative of final performance, it's still more competitive than its predecessor ever was, and that combined with brand loyalty suggests to me that it'll probably sell very well regardless. That is, assuming the $249 MSRP isn't a flat out lie.

It's very good that they didn't try to force a 3GB card onto that price point - at the $250 it seems a good deal, especially considering how much of a bad deal the GTX960 was. AMD will have to hope that their custom 480s can clock high enough to match it, since they won't be able to release anything faster until around the end of the year at the earliest. (We know that an overclocked 480 can reach 980 stock speeds, but the area of real interest is the actual ceiling vs ceiling performance) Question is, I suppose, when it'll actually be available for that $250 price point, given that the GTX1070 hasn't dropped to it's supposed $379 MSRP yet. This whole FE pricing thing is annoying at any level, but is at least vaguely understandable for low-supply, high-demand high-end cards. For mid-range cards, it seems pretty ridiculous.

When my old Wii U was replaced after being stolen and Nintendo did an Nintendo Network ID transfer, I found I couldn't access the shop or download patches, but the web browser and system updates still worked fine. I had to call them to get it fixed, since apparently the eshop account is handled separately behind the scenes to the NNID.

So it's a faithful continuation of the base game then? :D

That'd just burn you out on the game, there's no reason to do the exact same content twice before tackling new content. Finish the whole lot first, most definitely. NG+ doesn't even do much mechanically in the game anyway given the limited number of skill slots.

It was their previous gen that had known major issues, haven't heard of it recurring so chances are their current ones are probably fine. That said, historically statistics show Hitachi drives being the most reliable, ahead of WD and then Seagate. That said, you'll quickly notice that the other manufacturers don't actually have drives competing on price with the Seagate 7200. This is because they've opted for different strategies, there's only room for one entry level drive in each product range. Seagate's entry-level drives are 7200rpm, WD's are 5400rpm, and Hitachi (owned by WD these days) normally don't sell entry-level drives at all. (Fake edit: I tell a lie, in that WD do make the Blue range of entry level HDDs, and I do recommend these to absolute budget builders ....but they only come in 500GB and 1TB versions) Under normal circumstances then, the only option for 7200rpm at an entry-level price is Seagate. As mentioned before, I don't feel WD Blacks are worth the money, and Hitachi is even more of a premium product (5-year warranty, vs 2 years for the Seagate Barracuda and 3 years for WD Red). At that point you're almost at 1TB SSD prices, so it's not something I'd do. You will notice however on PC Part Picker there that the cheapest 2TB drive is a Hitachi. This is their old series, the 7k3000 (as opposed to the current 7k4000 series). These were excellent drives at the time, so if you don't mind that the stock may be at least three years old (The 7k4000 series launched in 2013 so Amazon probably found these old ones in the back of a warehouse somewhere), it's probably the technically better product. The Seagate will likely be very recently manufactured, but they're built to a price point. (I neglect to mention Toshiba because their market share is small, only about a third of the big two, so it's hard to get a read on their overall reputation. Samsung are also still around but their market share is absolutely tiny.)

True, the 7200rpm drive is faster, but a couple of factors tend to sway me: 1) The speed difference is not proportional to the difference in rotational speed, in practice the difference will be significantly smaller. Personally I believe a quieter, more reliable drive (Seagate have had issues lately) with a better warranty tips the balance in favour of the slightly slower drive. 2) SSD storage is becoming quite cheap, with a 1TB SSD occasionally even falling under 200EUR. Personally I've been able to fit all my games onto less than my 1TB of SSD space, and indeed ended up taking out all my spindle drives altogether. Even if you don't go as far as that, I believe it's more forward-looking to think of the traditional HDD as a media drive mostly. It's also for this reason that "premium" spindle drives like the WD Black series are no longer worth the money (and noise). In the end though, not a big deal really - it's mostly because I note you have a pretty generous budget so it's an ideal case to go heavy on the SSD route.

It's usually recommended to play the content in order, i.e. finish main game, then Hearts of Stone, then Blood and Wine. The minimum level recommended for the expansions is low-to-mid 30s so they're just about doable at your current level, but they will cause you to overlevel. Hearts of Stone takes place on the existing map, it just adds new locations to the previously unused north-east part. Storywise it doesn't break anything if you finish it before the main game. Blood and Wine takes place on an entirely new map, far away from the rest of the game. Storywise it'd be a bit silly and nonsensical to do it before finishing all other content.

Heard a lot of Finns just buy their PCs from Germany so here's a sample PCPartpicker build. Note I had to swap out the PSU but only because the EVGA G2 isn't available in Germany. As a general principle, I'd say throw any extra cash you want to spend at buying more SSD space, because you won't really get much out of it by spending any more on the other parts. You have an m.2 slot on the motherboard so you can get an m.2 SSD if you want. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor (€339.58 @ Mindfactory) CPU Cooler: Scythe Kotetsu 79.0 CFM CPU Cooler (€34.27 @ Amazon Deutschland) Motherboard: Asus Z170 PRO GAMING ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (€147.79 @ Mindfactory) Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€165.85 @ Mindfactory) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive (€106.79 @ Mindfactory) Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070 8GB G1 Gaming Video Card (€482.49 @ Mindfactory) Case: Fractal Design Define R5 Blackout Edition ATX Mid Tower Case (€105.05 @ Mindfactory) Power Supply: SeaSonic 650W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (€98.89 @ Amazon Deutschland) Total: €1480.71 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-03 05:00 CEST+0200

The shop you're linking to seems down at the moment so these are just more general recommendations: 1) I reckon we're finally at the point where the extra threads in an i7 are worthwhile in a gaming machine. For about another 100EUR I reckon go ahead and get the i7-6700. 2) Intel K-series CPUs no longer come with a cooler, so you'll need to buy one. The CoolerMaster 212 series is commonly considered the cheapest "good" option, though my personal pick would be a Scythe Kotetsu (or the larger Ninja 4, which might be inconveniently large). 3) A 650W PSU is fine. The only reason you'd need larger is if you plan to SLI *and* do heavy overclocking. 4) Some games love fast RAM these days and the price difference isn't much so you may as well go for DDR4-3000/3200.