mkreku

Sapphire is a budget brand. Comparing their cards to BFG/Hightech/Gecube or any other expensive brand is rather futile, as the prices vary a lot between brands. What I like about Sapphire is that they often overclock well, they even send their own overclocking software in the bundle, you get a lot of goodies in their packages (They send you four games to try out and you get to pick one or two of them) and their prices are generally very low. Compared to some of the most expensive brands on the market, there's sometimes a $100+ difference on the same card model, even though the performance difference is no more than 3-5%. To me, that is not worth it.

Nope, and I don't think you're dumb enough to believe that. But what is your point? Or rather, what is the point you're trying to make? That we didn't lose a competitor? We did. Four huge companies became three. That they're not competitors? Maybe not in their primary markets, but multi-billion dollar second markets aren't anything to disregard. No matter how you twist and turn it, four companies, direct competitors or not, became three. Is your point that the market didn't change at all? I don't get what you're trying to say. I admitted that the 25% number was a rough estimation because of their internal relations not being that easy to sum up, but what would it take for alan to admit that he might have been wrong? I guess the word "Shocking" is the closest we'll ever get to that.

Players going to arbitration could easily be an annoyance, but luckily they only get one arbitration per career.

I'm just happy he's not in Toronto anymore.

So because it's not their primary market, they're not competitors..? Strange logic. Edit: And this is what AMD wanted ATI for: Torrenza. http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3471 Who knows, maybe they wanted access to more silicon makers for $5.4 billion.. or maybe they wanted to develop this idea they presented a few months back.

ten

Good, but potentially dangerous question. I can imagine myself getting really irritated by the writing in one of Obsidian's coming games, if I find out that one of the writers is (for example) a right wing extremist. My mind will unconscously filter every piece of dialogue and writing through those views to try to find flaws and stuff to annoy myself on. I know that happened when we had a political thread in Way Off Topic a long time ago and one of the Obsidian employees came into the thread and defended the Bush administration and the Iraqi war. Or was it the Gulf war?

I thought his camera was acting up

Uhm.. If you're wondering why the swedish girl looked like a macaroni it was because in Sweden the feminist movement is very strong. Apparently it's bad to be judged by your looks so in Sweden you apply to become Miss Sweden! It's like a job application and they're chosen because of their skills! Fantastic, ins't it? No wonder we end up last in a beauty contest.

Where did Project New Jersey go..? What did I miss?

Intel makes motherboard chipsets. The competition between Nvidia nforce and Intel has always been hard. ATI has also entered the motherboard chipsets with their Xpress chips (which is why I think AMD wanted ATI in the first place, to get their hands on motherboard chipsets), so Intel competes with both ATI and Nvidia in that segment. AMD is more of an outsider as they only compete directly with Intel, but still.. how do you translate that into a percentage? I took the easy way out and just subtracted one of the competitors from the market.

I'm so happy I was being patient.. for once. I am still using socket A (3200+ overclocked until my Zalman fan starts to smoke) so I've been needing to upgrade my entire system for a while now. I decided to not jump on the Socket 939 train, but wait for the AM2 to arrive. When I saw how miniscule the gains were for AMD to go with DDR2, I decided to wait for what Conroe would bring to the market. I won't wait any longer than that though. This is the system that I'm currently thinking of: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz Socket LGA775, 4MB, BOXED (I'll replace the fan later, not released yet) ABIT AB9, P965, Socket-775, GbLAN, ATX, 6xSATAII, DDR2, Firewire, PCI-Ex16 (I've got a thing for Abit..) Corsair TWIN2X 6400PRO DDR2 2048MB CL4, Kit w/two 1GB Dimm's, E.P.P Technology. (Not quite settled on memory yet, but this is close.) Sapphire Radeon X1900XT 512MB GDDR3, PCI-Express,ViVo,Dual-DVI-I,Full-Retail (My cousins Sapphire X1800 GTO has impressed my pants off) Expensive upgrade, but totally worth it. It's like buying two-and-a-half Xbox 360's )

Oh crap. But after Gothic 3 is released, I'll have more than enough computer even for Crysis. I'm glad Crysis won't be released anytime soon.

Well, I've known for a long time that Conroe was supposed to be something special, so I've been eagerly awaiting that. Turns out it was a smart move. Now I'm only waiting for the motherboard manufacturers to catch up and Conroe to become available.. Yes, I'll be waiting forever..

25% of the competition just disappeared. We went from four big to three big companies competing. I hope this doesn't lead to something bad, but why are my Spiderman senses tingling?

I was lucky enough to play a paladin. For free. I played it for just over 6 months (and was like the tenth person on my server to reach level 60), but fortunately for me, the game dies when you reach the end-game as a paladin. Paladins can't player-kill (my favourite part of the game) and they're not wanted in end-game groups (since they basically suck at everything). That, combined with the sudden realization that I was actually having to pay for a subscription effectively killed my desire to play World of Warcraft. I got out! But I do miss the game sometimes.. It was an awesome ride from level 1 to 60. Beyond that it was a bore and a chore.

I've been pondering metadigital's opinion about Xbox 360 and Playstation 2 being as apples and oranges when compared, and I must say I disagree too. I haven't found any research in the field, but I do know from personal experience that I bought a Playstation 2 to get a DVD-player in my household plus a games console. The console is first and foremost a games machine, but it does have other uses too. Sure, the Xbox 360 has more features, more power and more of basically everything, but would anyone actually buy an Xbox 360 exclusively to stream music to their livingroom..? I highly doubt that. Or, in the words of Kaz 'Crazy' Hirai: "The basic approach we'll take is similar to the approach we took with the PlayStation Portable. That it does a lot of fun things, but we don't want to dilute the message. You'll confuse the consumer even more if you go out there and say if it's a multimedia platform. The first thing we need to say is that the PS3 is the best console out there for interactive games." Source: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=2&cId=3152329 I know he's discussing the Playstation 3, but I believe the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 share a lot of similarities on how they want to market themselves, and that is directly in the market for consoles.

Actually, it was more like: wait till you got an automatic weapon, full auto, go get coffee while all the rats move, one by one, reload, wait for more rats to move one by one (sometimes taking 1 hp away from you!!) and then, by the end of the week, you'd see the end of the fight closing in. Who'd want to be in control of the combat when you can have one-rat-at-a-time slideshows?

Hmm. Can't say I like this potential merger. It's not like there's enough competition out there right now. Two giants mergin only means even less competition. I guess we'll have to trust XGI to come through.. right. Just as ATI is introducing their first GDDR4 memory modules on their cards (X1950XT), XGI reaches DDR2!!1

I'm playing with my hardware (crash and burn!) while I'm waiting to get hold of Steambot Chronicles. I hate waiting for a game I've heard almost nothing about. For some reason waiting for it builds up my expectations for the game, especially if it's a steampunk RPG for the Playstation 2. I don't often get a chance to play steampunk or postapocalyptic RPG's.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3445 Not news, nothing new, just a blog that happens to express my feelings about the current game library on the Xbox 360 dead on. I'll decide around christmas whether or not I'll pick up a Xbox 360, Playstation 3 or Wiiiiii. Or maybe just upgrade my PC to unhealthy levels?

Rosbjerg is like the EA of virtual moviemaking!

You obviously haven't read the Nvidia forums after the release of the Forceware 91.31 drivers.. SLI balloons popping up everytime you turn on your computer (It's like an advertisement for a product I already paid $300 for!), screen ratio getting screwed when showing movies because of a bug, the icon in the system tray is unremovable and so on and so forth. The drivers just plain suck. I guess it's bad luck that all these problems started appearing just as I switched from ATI to Nvidia, but I am going ATI for my next GPU. I prefer the picture quality from ATI anyhow.

I thought they already made the move to 65nm production? That should take care of the heat problems, right? Edit: Ok, I jumped the gun. 2007, baby! http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/04/21/65nm_pro...or_for_xbox360/

I enjoy seeing the NHL thread getting bigger and bigger.. This new thread is too tiny. And it'll remain tiny since this is the slowest part of the season for the NHL. I wouldn't mind the thread-cutting in the autumn, after the NHL season started (as we're usually a lot more active by then), but now..? Our NHL thread is going to be puny for months!