Humanoid

The 980 has never been justifiable, yeah, it's either the 970 or the 980Ti on nVidia's side, the rest of their range doesn't really stack up. So yeah, just backing the call for the 970 which is probably the overall pick from both nV and AMD sides assuming you stick with 1080p. The only wildcard is really if you can find a clearance 290/290X for significantly cheaper than the 970 somewhere - the load power difference is around 50W, going up to 75W worst case so it's managable even on a 500W PSU at stock clocks. They're probably long gone from most stores now though. 390 series is a bit harder to justify without a price advantage, the 970 is a better experience *now*, and while early signs are that the AMD cards may well gain the advantage as Win10/DX12 gain market traction, that's probably far enough into the future such that you may have upgraded anyway by then.

I couldn't deal with how the daggers when "sheathed" would just float there on your back. Even by 1990s 3D graphics standards that looks awful. The really weird thing is that swords look perfectly acceptable and sheathe at the hip.

FRAPS is the grand old dame of recording software, no idea how it compares today though - no reason to find out really since FRAPS is a lifetime licence. I know of Bandicam and nVidia's ShadowPlay, so I guess searching for a comparison between those options might be the way to go, which will probably toss up a couple of other options that I've never heard of as well.

Well if you go the other way and overindulge more, you'll eventually be able to fill out that bikini top.

Huh, so the filler crap essentially came from a Chinese sweatshop content factory. Now that you mention it, yeah, I can totally see that being true. I think that's a new low, even for EA. Well at least it wasn't the core content, like the stuff farmed out in Human Revolution.

I call it a Diablo clone even though I've never played Diablo. I tend to just imagine that Diablo is Divine Divinity without the humour. Now before you correct me, I'm sure I'm wrong on several points, but no one is going to get me to play Diablo so I will never know. I also only put in, oh, maybe ten hours max into DD. I think I played DD over D on the insistence of Di. (....and that statement sounds dirtier than it is)

Gameport to USB adapters are a thing, but can be a bit hit-and-miss in terms of properly converting the inputs. Might be worth it only if it was a reasonably good flight stick back in the day, otherwise just buying a new stick would likely be more cost effective. For that blend of old-and-new, CH still make the exact same iconic flightsticks they made back in the 90s, but with a USB interface. That's the route I took personally, since all the flight sims I play are rather ancient. Might change with Star Citizen of course, then I might have to buy the throttle, something I could never justify as a kid back in the 90s.

Well they've had 15 years to improve their dialogue, so I'm not holding my breath. I don't actually mind the sometimes-silly extreme options being there, but there really should be more measured, moderate or non-committal options, so there's been a shortage of both quality and quantity of writing. That said, the way I played the previous game, it's no huge concern, either way it'll be a big multiplayer trollfest.

Considering the quality of the dialogue in the first game, I'd give a chance to the new system they're trying. Granted the happy medium is just to write *more* dialogue options, but if there's only going to be two options in a given branch for example, I'd prefer the generic and unspecific responses rather than the extremes the old system had. A big offender was the dialogue between the two player characters, it was either sickeningly saccharine sycophancy or Jerkface McJerk jerkiness.

To be honest I just blind-backed it at the CE last night (it was late!) without reading any of the details, so I have no idea what most of these potential issues are about yet. Reading the Kickstarter page now. Doubt it'll make any difference because there's such huge gaps between tiers that there's no real decision to make between them.

I can't deal with a party of six these days no matter what kind of system is used. Even four is pushing it, but I'll tolerate it if the game is good enough.

Forgetting thermal paste on a modern CPU would probably just cause it to throttle when under load. Even running without a heatsink at all is likely to just result in a safe automatic power-off. Certainly a far cry from the old days where doing so would result in the CPU going up in a plume of blue smoke within a second.

Don't have time to play it as yet, but glad to hear the matrix sections being less pointlessly crappier versions of normal combat. I get that that stuff is iconic to the Shadowrun setting, but a persistent gripe of mine is that it for a newcomer, it always felt like pointless filler, just an uglier version of the "real world" firefights with fewer options and abilities.

More likely the RAM caused the issue than vice-versa.

Yeah, memory QVLs aren't exhaustive, compatibility should be fine so test them as advised, one stick at a time if necessary. I'd also fall back to the integrated graphics to just minimise the running parts. If it passes, I'd try booting Linux from a USB stick (or a DVD) with no other drives installed.

It's worth noting that with Intel, their last couple of die-shrinks have actually resulted in power consumption going *up* for the desktop chips and performance/watt has pretty much stayed the same. Frankly I expect sub-50% performance gains from the next generation, and that the primary improvement will be on the DX12 factor and not the actual hardware. In time, they'll be able to pump out big-die 16nm GPUs which is where the performance will come from - i.e. the brute force approach of more transistors - but realistically, the first generation on that node will consist of comparatively smaller chips, probably with more or less the same transistor count as the current high-end. Kaby Lake at the moment sounds like it'll be an improvement on the integrated graphics of Skylake and bugger-all change in the actual CPU part. A hex- or octa-core Skylake-E would be the thing to wait for I imagine if you really have an upgrade itch, but it'd only be of benefit for playing games that scale with number of physical cores. To be honest, I reckon any Haswell or Skylake i7 will easily last another 4-5 years.

If a mysterious benefactor sneakily replaced your 4770K with a 6700K, you'd never even notice a difference, it's pretty much a current product still. Clock for clock it's a single-digit difference in even the most CPU-bound tasks. But yeah, the graphics market has been pretty glacial too, which isn't surprising given both sides of the duopoly have been stuck at 28nm for years, and tellingly products that launched in 2012 are still sold today. Fortunately that's changing in about a year.

Honestly I'd still say that if you have an overclockable Sandy Bridge or newer, Skylake does very little for you, assuming you're comfortable clocking it to ~4.5GHz which is about the same clock speed Skylake typically overclocks to. The gains from 1st generation (Nehalem, 7xx to 9xx) to 2nd generation (Sandy Bridge, 2xxx) were the last time Intel made any significant gains between generations, and that switch happened in 2011. I'd been running an i5-750 so the upgrade was worth it for me. That said, if your current CPU isn't overclockable (i.e. not a -K version), then Skylake may be justifiable purely for the raw clock speed increase, since those CPUs would typically be running at only a little over 3GHz. There are other minor perks for upgrading such as USB3.0/3.1 support, SATA3, m.2 slots, and somewhat faster boot times, but they're just that, minor perks. Dollar for dollar, throwing more cash at graphics cards will yield better results every time.

I was pretty lukewarm about D:OS first up, played the first act and thought I'd seen enough. Then a year later I started up a co-op playthrough with my sister and ended up loving it, so I'm definitely in again. I guess there's something to be said about playing something the way it was intended, though I suppose it can be seen as a fault with the developer that they tried to have a bob each way and couldn't really pull it off.

Revised: CPU: Intel i7-6700K CPU Cooler: Scythe Mugen 4 / Glide Stream 120 fan (1400rpm PWM) M/B: Asus Z170-AR RAM: 2x8GB G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3000 HDD: None SSD1: 500GB Samsung 850 EVO m.2 SSD2: 256GB Crucial m4 SSD3: 250GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD4: 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus Video: Gigabyte R9 290X Windforce 3X OC Sound: Topping VX1 DAC + Stereo amplifier ODD: Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-ray combo Case: Fractal Design Define R5 PSU: EVGA Supernova G2 850W O/S: Windows 10 Home Mouse: Logitech M705 Marathon Mouse Keyboard: Das Keyboard Professional Silent (Cherry Brown) Display: 2x Dell U2711 27" IPS Speakers: Monitor Audio Bronze BR2 Headphones: Alessandro MS-1i Gaming Peripherals: - CH Products F-16 Fighterstick USB - Thrustmaster HOTAS Cougar - XBox360 Wireless controller for PC Backup: 2TB External WD My Passport Router: TP-Link Archer D7

So sometime Saturday afternoon I wandered outside of the house to throw out some rubbish and found that $1500 worth of stuff had been left by a courier on my front doorstep god-knows-how-long-ago. Pretty disconcerting, but on the plus side it meant I could get my build done over the weekend. The physical build was easy enough, but by god, the process of clean installing Windows 10, starting with an old Win7 Family Pack licence, was an ordeal of nightmarish proportions. Intel i7-6700K Scythe Mugen 4 Asus Z170-AR 16GB G.Skill 3000MHz DDR4 500GB Samsung 850 EVO m.2 Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-ray Combo Fractal Design Define R4 EVGA Supernova G2 850W Plus carried over parts: Gigabyte Windforce R9 290X 256GB Crucial m4 250GB Samsung 840 EVO 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus Topping VX1 DAC/Amp (actually using the DAC portion now) Need to go back and do some overclocking of the CPU and some underclocking of the GPU. Really wish Arctic Cooling would do a deal with a graphics card vendor to get their coolers factory-installed on high-end cards.

The was probably a fair bit of churn at the end of WoTLK, but as the trend for the preceding years at that point shows, they were still signing up brand new customers at that point to offset subscriber losses. Initially I thought it might have been the impact of the Annual Pass, that promotion they had that if you committed to a one-year subscription to WoW, you'd get Diablo 3 for free, but that was apparently late 2011. There's also a big gap where subs were not reported between the end of 2009 and October 2010, so they may well have been a dip there that's effectively hidden by subs climbing back up on the crest of new expansion hype (see the September 2014 uptick).

Plenty of options with Intel Atom CPUs nowadays being really rather good. As usual, my go-to for recommendations is Notebookcheck, who happily enough have a handy Top 10 Windows Tablets section which is regularly updated, and most are easily in your price range.

Of all the big drugs scandals that have happened in recent years, they've almost all been instigated by a criminal investigation, so at least we know that part of of enforcement isn't totally broken. Remember that Armstrong was only toppled when Landis went nuclear and talked to the feds. Historically the major busts have been down to police raiding hotel rooms, or drug couriers being caught at border controls (as in the Festina affair). The respective sports' governing bodies most certainly did try to cover up any evidence, and calling them willfully ignorant is being charitable. At least the US it goes that far - in Spain, a major doping investigation - Operacion Puerto - that netted some cycling and track and field stars was shut down by the Spanish government as soon as word got out that some football stars playing for three of the country's largest clubs may be implicated, not to mention a certain tennis superstar. In the case of the major US sports like baseball, they're not even signatories to WADA, so they're a law unto themselves, with slap-on-the-wrist punishments for offenders - suspensions of not even one season, as opposed to base four-year bans. The sports are big enough that they can stand on their own commercially, a luxury smaller sports don't have. The Australian Rules football league for example has been engulfed in a team-wide doping scandal in recent times, and would dearly love to renounce membership of WADA so they can apply their own arbitrary (non-)punishment of the team involved, because effectively banning one of the largest teams in the sport for up to two years would be financially disastrous. But the federal government has made it clear in no uncertain terms that if the governing body were to do that, the sport would lose all government funding, an even more unpalatable option for them.

Hmm, that made me go check whether drivers were available for my Asus Essence ST. Answer is no. Then I checked for the Win8.1 driver. There's one download, a beta driver from April 2014. So Asus are just as bad, if not worse than Creative in that regard. That said, I don't even know if the Z170 board I'll eventually be going for will even have a PCI slot, so it might be a moot point. Every chance I'll just use the DAC in my Topping VX1 amp I think, though I haven't tested it yet.