angshuman

Thanks for the info! I was considering going in for an 8800GT in the near future. I would've probably ignored a 128-bit spec as a typo or something.

LOL interesting! Thanks for the update, I had stopped following the thread after it was closed (temporarily?) by the admins. I guess this is a classic case of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/08/07/25/1150218.shtml Of course, they're free to support whatever the hell they want to on their boards, but when their BIOS ships with code that deliberately uses broken ACPI tables on an "if (OS == Linux)" condition, that's pushing it a bit... into antitrust territory.

Agreed. I don't like the idea of re-specing in any game in general. It detracts from the satisfaction of building a solid character. In MMO's you could argue that it would be too severe to not allow it, but in a game like Diablo I don't like the idea at all.

Holy ****.

Wow. Slower than a GX2 in majority of benchmarks. Costs $150 more. 1.4 BILLION TRANSISTORS AT 65nm => terrible yields. Doesn't appear to be a sound financial move on Nvidia's part to have released this. They should have kept it as an engineering exercise and released it a few months later in 45nm, potentially in GX2 form.

Already spent way too much money on games this year Must... resist...

There are quite a few very good 64bit *nixes around, you know? What's keeping you from using them, and if it's gaming and Microsoft programs, why not setting up a dual boot machine? /agree. Ubuntu is freaking incredible. You can do everything you could in Unix + X11, plus you have access to all the source code, plus Compiz will give you eye candy that shames Aero and Mac. I use it for pretty much everything except MS Office and games (for which I use XP).

Very few contemporary applications are memory-bandwidth limited. Get any memory sticks that your mobo can support, you'll be fine. Of course, the amount of RAM does have a huge impact. Since it's a new PC, I'd say get at least 4GB unless you plan on upgrading soon.

Yeah, the 800 -> 1333 upgrade is not going to make a big difference. However, the Cedar Mill (Pentium4D) to Conroe (C2D) upgrade is freaking HUGE. A 1.8GHz C2D with 2MB cache can run circles around a 3.6GHz P4D. You're getting a 3.0GHz C2D with 4MB cache. Hypothetically, if the P4s existed to this date, then we're talking about the equivalent performance of a ~6-7GHz Cedar Mill. The difference *is* really that huge. Despite this, as mkreku said, you probably won't perceive this in a lot of real-world scenarios, where you'll likely be bottlenecked by memory latency, HDD and GPU speed.

1up Review

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=c...70&Itemid=2

There was a time when Nvidia drivers used to be rock-solid (the 6800 era). Times have changed, unfortunately.

http://contentconsumer.wordpress.com/2008/...-my-girlfriend/

Psyduck

Use this for office work, browsing, youtube, music, movies, development, fancy-schmancy transparent-window eye-candy, and even for playing older games. Use this or this for playing newer games. There you go. Bulletproof solution. It's cheap and you can enjoy your hardware for 4-5 years without having to upgrade. Now, if only I could convince myself to adopt my own solution...

In order of recollection (which might be vaguely correlated with the impact each of these games had on me): Ninja Gaiden: Black Half Life Diablo KotOR KotOR-II Portal No One Lives Forever 2 CnC Generals Zero Hour Guild Wars NFS Porsche Unleashed

Do you have an Nvidia card? If so you could consider investing in their PureVideo DVD decoder. It offloads the bulk of the decoding process to the GPU, plus it does a fantastic job (the best I've seen) of deinterlacing non-progressive-scan content. You can use the decoder with frontends like Media Player Classic, Zoom Player (both excellent frontends) and even Windows Media Player.

Fair enough. It still seems you need to be in the $1000-investment ballpark to gain anything out of Vista, which is more than what 95% (completely unscientific guesstimate) of gamers would be willing to pay. For that 95% -- a lot of which are fairly serious gamers with, say, 8800GT-class setups -- XP is faster than Vista. I can't argue against the theoretical validity of your original comment, but theoretical maxima are moot when you're trying to sell a volume product such as Vista. All said and done, it's a bad, bloated product which probably started off with a decent set of design goals but ended up as a complete mess due to some terrible design decisions accompanied by craptacular drivers from Nvidia, Creative et al.

So you're saying that Vista is faster for those that wish to invest $1800 on video cards alone (3x 9800GX2s... because if you're looking at 3-way SLI you're probably not looking at something like 3x 8800s since 2x 9800GX2 would be faster, cheaper, and less cumbersome).

Exactly. The only argument you can make against consoles IMO is where the mouse and keyboard interface has a definite advantage (FPS's) or are an absolute requirement (RTS's). The old demographic argument (consoles are for teh kids) that probably made sense in the N64 generation is no longer valid today. I do think those screenies are ugly, although that wouldn't stop me from trying out the game. But the Morrowind-style gameplay somehow just doesn't appeal to me.

You need to get a hold of God of War & God of War 2 & Resident Evil 4 & Dragon Quest 8: Journey of the Cursed King & Bully & ... There are LOTS of quality games available for you if this is your first PS2. Thanks! I'm beginning to realize what I'd been missing all these years.

Bought myself a used fat PS2 for 35 bucks!! Playing Gran Turismo 4 and absolutely loving it. It's been several years since I've played a racing game that I really liked. Also started playing Jak and Daxter... another delightful game! I have Xenosaga I sitting around somewhere, I'll get to it sometime.

Ah okay, I'm 90% sure it's the VGA that's doing it.

I hate runner band AI. I simply cannot understand the logic behind it. Among other things, "catch-up" in career mode was what made me move away from the Need For Speed series for good. That franchise hit its high point with Porsche Unleashed, it's been downhill since then. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any other driving game that captures the balance between arcade and simulation physics as well as Porsche did. The exotic locations in all the old NFS games were awesome too. I'm not a big fan of the open-city stuff.