Spider

I'm going to get either the Zalman ZM850 or the Antec TruePower Quattro 850. In my eyes those seem to be among the best choices. The Zalman is most likely my choice due to lower noise levels. The Antec one is available in 1000 watts as well if you prefer (not that much more expensive, but it's a tad overkill unless you're going triple crossfire/sli, and may not be needed even then) Speaking of noise levels, I'm not sure I'd worry too much about the 4850 being nosiy. They reach the peak levels during load. So if you stress them out, yeah they'll be noisy (as in gaming). But when doing day-to-day activities, they're probably going to be fairly silent. I know my 9800GTX doesn't make much noise when not under load.

The word meant something different yes. But it doesn't mean elves as such are wholly Tolkien creations. While he didn't build them off of Elfs, he was heavily influenced by the gaelic aes s

Oh yes, there is. Deny, deny, and well, ok then. It is distinct. But as far as brilliant and believable goes? Not so much. It had some moments where it was pretty good, but there was just so much filler that it dragged story progression down to a crawl. The combat was ok, but nothing spectacular. And character progression is almost completely meaningless, because you get so many skill points you get to max most everything anyway. I liked Gothic 3 and don't care much for The Witcher. So does this mean you'll get interested in in TW now?

The 8800 GT used to be the best buy up until about two weeks ago. Currently ATI is owning that segment. The 4850 has performance better than the 9800GTX and in some tests on par with the Nvidia 260. So that's probably where you're going to want to spend your money if bang for buck is what you're after. Also, there's been a price drop on the 9800GTX, lowering them to 200. Not sure if it has hit yet though, but it will soon enough. And there will also be a modified 9800GTX+ out soon that'll retail at $219 or so. But I doubt that it'll be a better buy than the 4850. I just recently upgraded and went with a 9800GTX, but only because I had already bought a Nvidia SLI-motherboard. If I had waited a week with the motherboard, I would have gone ATI for sure. Intel owns the processor market, but I'm not sure it's worth getting a quad core processor. Maybe they'll last a little longer, but I don't think there will be much in the way of games or programs to take advantage of four cores anytime soon. They're hardly taking advantage of two as it is. It comes down to budget, I suppose. If you feel you can afford it, a quad processor is a better buy, but there is no real shame in getting a e8-series processor either. At least not until Nehalem comes out. I got an e8400 myself, but would have bought an e8200 if I hadn't found the stronger model at a lower peice than the weaker (the difference is marginal, especially if you intend to OC yourself). As for the memory thing. More than 4 GB of memory will be a waste if you use any 32-bit version of Windows. Any 64-bit version and you'll be fine. I've also heard that Linux can handle more than 4 without 64-bit, but I'm not sure. Also, I think Intel has just put out a new set of motherboard circuits. Probably worth looking at.

So I recently bought new parts for my computer. A pretty hefty upgrade, but I still thought my old PSU would be able to keep up. Turns out I was wrong. The damned thing can hardly boot, it freezes during post. And on the few occasions I manage to get past that, it freezes during OS install. I've tried pretty much everything, until I figured it must be the PSU that is the culprit. So I took the computer down to a friend with a better PSU and there everything worked like a charm. So now I need to get a new one obviously. This is where I need help. Since I apparently haven't paid attention to PSU:s for a while I don't even know how much power I need. I've tried using online calculators, but they give wildly different results. Anyway, here is what I've got: Asus P5N-T motherboard (Nvidia 780i circuits) Intel E8400 processor EVGA 9800GTX GPU (Bios overclocked to 800MHZ instead of 675) 2 DDR2 sticks

I love the art direction. The whole idea is that society is supposed to be utopian in it's nature. And for me the color scheme fits fairly well with that vision. A clean safe city. I'd hate living there though...

I'm all for some sort of limits on respecing. Exactly what I don't know. I probably wouldn't use it all that much, like I said just to get out of bad skill choices. So probably only once or twice, definitely no more than five times.

Speaking of Hellgate: London and respecing by the way, I think they did end up implementing respecing after all. I know there was talk of a patch that would provide a limited amount of respec-tokens for all players and a way to get more for the subscribers. Don't know if it ever happened, but I do know a lot of players wanted that (mostly because the skills were horribly unbalanced). So it's starting to be fairly common to the genre. So the apparent inclusion (according to the post above) should come as no surprise really.

I would greatly appreciate re-speccing. To the point where I doubt I will ever finish the game if it isn't in. At least not on all difficulty levels. It's simple really. Not all skills are created equal, at least not when personal playstyle and preference is accounted for. But you usually don't figure that out until you've played with the skills for a bit. And if I play a game for 20 hours or so and then feel that I either need to start over with the same class or have a gimped character, I will quickly lose interest. Hellgate: London for instance did this to me. The game sucked anyway, but it was incredibly frustrating having put points in skills I never used because their description was misleading. On the other hand, Titan Quest allowed re-speccing and I loved it. It was money based, but not exactly cheap. At least not until you hit high levels where gold was basically falling from the sky, but at that point it didn't matter as much because I usually knew what the character was going for so I didn't need the re-spec. But it greatly increased my enjoyment of the early-to-mid game.

Is that a shooter? I thought it was an action-RPG with skills and junk. I haven't heard a lot of positives about it though. That's because there isn't very much positive to say about it. It's a pretty crappy game, at least on release. The only thing that made it appeal to me for a while was the views. If you played a character that focused on range, it would play in first-person view and it would have shooter-like mecahnics. Or shooter light. But enhanced with skills (but not accuracy, if you hit, you hit). So it's an action-rpg with shooter elements. The rest of it kinda sucked though.

What? Where? My memories of playing DS One is that the controls were virtually identical to Freelancer and that the missions were equally identical but less varied. I honestly don't see where you're coming from here. Also, since you only had one ship, the whole trading aspect of the game felt kinda pointless. I typically had no problems buying all the upgrades I wanted from just mission money. Edit: Oh, oh, I just remembered a game to recommend. Space Rangers 2. Definitely not a space sim, the game is a turn based space combat/trader with some planetside RTS missions thrown in for good measure. But it's space, it's exploration and it's trading. Graphics aren't anything spectacular, nor is the writing. But it's pretty fun (although it also gets a bit repetitive at the end)

Dark Star One feels very much like Freelancer. At first. Then you realize it's a very, very shallow version of Freelancer. It's fun for about 5-10 hours, then it just gets repetitive and boring.

I actually have two network cards on my current computer. One is used to connect to the internet, the other is used to connect to my home network and (at least theoretically, it only works very sporadically) share the internet connection downhill. I do it this way instead of using a router because the router I do have (which is hooked up downstream) has such crappy throughput. My 100Mb connection gets turned into 2Mb more or less. So I'd welcome a computer with two built in NICs. There's also the question of redundancy. If one breaks (and that does happen) you'll still have one left.

Although the quote doesn't really say we can reach epic levels. It says the cap is level 30, not that we'll actually reach it. With an estimate that the average player will reach level 15 I would rather think that the hardcore people who explore everywhere will end the game around 20. But it's just speculation of course. For instance, you never reached the level cap in Icewind Dale either (pretty far from it) unless you really, really tried.

From Anandtech: The Radeon HD 4850 is a single slot design, but the card itself gets very hot. At idle the card is mostly silent, but like the GeForce GTX 280 you can hear this thing once the fan spins up. It's definitely not as loud as the GTX 280, but it's not silent under full load. Another review (sort of): http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14967/1 There they mention that the card runs very hot. Hotter than any other card in their test. So I don't think passive cooling is something to expect from it.

Since mkreku seems to have slacked off, I guess I might as well post this. Apparently ATI felt that they needed to start officially selling these cards sooner than they had planned, due to some retailers having jumped the gun. Anandtech has a preview (that is exactly like a review but without the tech talk): http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3338 It beats the 9800 GTX in most tests and the 280 in some. So that's some bang for the buck. As a response, Nvidia is dropping the price of the 9800GTX to $199 and releaseing a reworked version called 9800GTX+ at $229. As Anandtech wrote, it's nice to have some real competition in the GFX department again. (I'm only a bit bummed that all of this happened after I bought a SLI motherboard, so I guess it'll be a 9800GTX for me when the price drop hits, but Nvidia still wins with SLI, so if I get a second one, I suppose I'll feel better)

I'm pretty sure SecuRom has been adding itself to the registry for a long time. I have a SecuRom entry, and another one underneath NWN2 in the registry.

Tempting. It's been so long since I played Torment. Thought I can't manage to finish any other IE games these days maybe I would be able to get through Torment. But I can't play any game at that resolution anymore, so does the Widescreen mod work with Torment? (I know it says Torment is supported, I'm more wondering if anyone has had any hands on experience with it) I'm mainly interested in playing the game in my screens native 1280x1024 if possible, but I guess 1024x768 would do in a pinch.

If you upgrading means you'll actually install Two Worlds, then I'd recommend you to burn your money instead. It's an awful, awful game. (or you can just stock to playing the other games in your list if you find the idea of burning money appalling) If I go by Swedish prices, my estimate is that you'll save roughly

Just a clarification, he is talking about two different games. Vampire and D&D 3.5 aren't even shipped by the same companies. And Vampire is a setting, the rulebook is World of Darkness (which do have better art than 3.5). It's a lot likelier that there will be a D&D 4.0 videogame though. Considering how well Bloodlines did I'd be amazed if any company will touch the White Wolf properties with a ten foot pole. So if you're never ever going to play with them, I'd say go for 4.0.

I've played both and think they are about equal. Gameplay is very similar and the stories are both fairly out there in the end. There is a lot of camp going on in both games, but that's part of the appeal for me. But if you're getting annoyed by the camp, it's not going to go away. So there's that.

I really like her. Probably my favorite character in BG2. Well written and a very interesting side quest. She was a lot worse in BG1 though.

Just out of curiosity, are you looking at Alpha Protocol as a PC game that is being adapted to consoles? Because I'm definitely looking at it the other way around, a game designed primarily for consoles, that is also happening to get a simultaneous PC port. So if infinite ammo is something that appeals to the console gamers mindset, then they definitely should include it. Personally I'm thinking in the lines of Hell Kitty. If limited ammo is to be in the game (or any game) it needs to be relevant. Ammo needs to be so scarce that I sometimes have to do without. If it's just finite for the sake of finite, but with enough of it to never really matter, then it might just as well be infinite. I would prefer it to be infinite clips rather than clips with no bottom though, but can live with it either way.

Yeah, there are several releases (two to be specific). Doesn't change the fact that they don't work. Read the comments. Mass Effect does run the risk of getting a similar bad rep as Titan Quest did though. The error doesn't show right away apparently. But anyone talking about buggy galaxy map and non-working save features is most likely playing a cracked version. So hopefully those complaints will be kept on the down-low.

There's a crack, anyway. I don't know about fully-functional though. Or rather I do know it's far from, unless you count no quick saves and no galaxy map as fully functional.