angshuman

I hate Sean Paul with a passion.

"UPDATE: The Sony Press Conference start time is behind schedule. The live stream will start as soon as the conference begins."

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2751

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. How is the Valve-Laidback relationship any different from the Publisher-Laidback relationship? Since Valve does not provide the developer as much reach and availability for the game as a traditional CDROM publisher, they obviously charge less. At the same time, my understanding was that the game was always "owned" by the publisher, not the developer. I wonder if it's the same here, or whether Valve strictly provides a paid service, nothing more. Does anyone here have an idea of approximately what percentage of the revenue a publisher allows its developer to have? Is it as bad as the music industry?

That's like having a vacuum cleaner sucking up power whilst on the computer ... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Does it come with an interface to hook it up to the borough's supply transformer?

No, no, it's JiggaWatt! 1 JiggaWatt = 1000000000000000 billion zillion bajillion GigaWatts.

Here's nVidia's reply to that GPU. Credit: Some random guy.

Three X's man, three X's... can't go wrong. (w00t)

Fair enough. What bugs me is the fact that a couple of years back, if you wanted to play the latest games at 1600x1200, all you had to do was buy the most expensive (e.g. $400 for the Ti4600) video card. Today, if you want to play Tomb Raider, a dual-7900GTX setup worth $1200 won't give you a flawless experience. A year from now, game developers will be developing games with quad-SLI in mind. The thing is, if a quad-SLI setup would cost $500, I have no qualms. I think this SLI game is ridiculous. I don't care whether I'm using 1 card or 2 cards or 15 cards. I want a graphics solution that enables me to play the latest games at the highest resolutions. How much do I have to pay for that? Over the past several years, the answers to this question have fallen on a linear-ish curve. With the coming of SLI, its suddenly starting to go exponential. $200 - $300 - $400 - $500 - $600 - $1200 - $2500... WTF?!?? I believe all AMD and Intel processors are currently fabbed on 90nm. Conroe will be 65nm. But yes, your point is still valid, the technology shrink will enable it to be clocked higher. Also, Conroe has a bunch of non-trivial architectural improvements over the Pentium M, which make it faster clock-for-clock, especially for floating-point and SSE applications. And it's going to be plugged into a dual-channel memory system (hopefully with an improved controller). Overall, Conroe is a significant evolutionary step up from the Pentium M.

B-but... aren't Intel the underdogs? Look at their stock prices. Look at their current products. Look at their management. :D

As far as microarchitecture is concerned, it's going to be very hard for Conroe to go wrong. It is the product of years of evolution and fine-tuning of what was a simple and beautiful microarchitecture to begin with. It's "wider" than any existing processor. Plus, Intel's manufacturing and process technologies are so much better than other fabs it's not even funny. Of late, AMD has been the one charging ridiculous prices for its processors, especially the dual-cores (although they have been offering better performance). As far as I can see, the only way Conroe can go wrong is if AMD comes up with something revolutionary via K10, or if Intel's platform/memory interface is ridiculously bad. Both are unlikely scenarios -- AMD has only announced their AM2 (DDR2) interface and do not appear to be introducing a new microarchitecture anytime soon, and Intel's bus, unsophisticated as it may be, does get the job done somehow through sheer brute force.

How long do you wish to wait? Intel's Conroe is coming up in a couple of months, and (I believe) it's worth waiting for. Bokishi's right, video cards are now going through a "dark age". Nvidia is trying to milk their aging architectures for all they are worth by mindlessly bumping up pipe counts and clock speeds, while ATi are fumbling with cool new architectures that are not quite mature enough to be implemented efficiently using current technologies.

Pixies, you haven't opened your case yet right? Maybe you *do* have an AGP slot. Try to open up your case. You can easily make out the AGP slot on your motherboard since it is not aligned with the rest of the perfectly aligned PCI slots. It's also usually the slot closest to the CPU (that big behemoth sitting on the motherboard) and I believe it is typically brown in color (as opposed to the off-white PCI slots).

Thanks. :D

ROFLMAO.

About 6 months back, I had assembled a machine for a buddy, with a 19" LG1930B. It cost him a whopping $269. As I mentioned, they canned the product because you cannot quantify and advertise the quality of a S-IPS, but you can advertise response times.... 8ms ZOMG!1!. Today, you can buy the following S-IPS monitors: - Dell 2001FP: ~$450 - Dell 2005FP: ~$450 - HP 2335: $850

In case you're still going the Newegg route, I can give a couple of suggestions: 1. Try to get a Socket 939 mobo and CPU. 2. Get a nice, big case from a reputed manufacturer. Assembling the system will be a lot easier if you have legible English manuals. Cooler-Master, Enermax, Lian-Li and Thermaltake are good. 3. Make sure the Power Supply is able to provide at least 26 amps on the +12V rail, if you are planning to run a high-end vid card. Some power supplies have dual-rail +12V in which case about 16A on each rail is good. 4. Get a nice Microsoft or Logitech keyboard, and a Logitech G5 mouse 5. Don't ever buy a Hard Drive at MSRP, they are way too overpriced. Look for mail-in rebates at Best Buy or Circuit City. There's *always* something available. You shouldn't have to pay more than $50 on a 160GB HDD. Western Digital should be fine. 6. If I were you, I'd get a cheap CRT for now, and save up for a nice high-end widescreen monitor (Apple Cinema, HP2335), most of which use S-IPS panels. Edit: removed another rant about TN displays, which seems to annoy some people here.

ATi has the Mobility Radeon series and nVidia the GeForce Go range. IMO she should get the most expensive one she can afford; performance should be more or less proportional to price. The ultra-high end (Radeon X1800, GeForce 7800) would probably be obscenely expensive. A good tradeoff could be a Radeon X800-class or GeForce 6800-class, but I'm absolutely out of the loop on current mobile card prices.

Not really. A 1.8GHz PentiumM is about as fast as a 3.0GHz Pentium4.

I wouldn't buy it. There are several things that are bugging me about that system: - It's a bit too CPU/Motherboard-bottlenecked. Socket 754 only supports single-channel memory. That 3000+ Sempron is not really the fastest of the bunch. At least, not when you pair it with an X1800. - I'm not too sure about the quality of the Case and PSU. 420W should be good enough, provided it comes from a reputed manufacturer like OCZ or Enermax. Linkworld... I wouldn't be too happy. - This is a personal prejudice, but I wouldn't have a Western Digital as my primary HDD. - That monitor has a 6-bit TN-type LCD panel. While its response times would be good, the color reproduction is horrible (as is the case with all TN displays). If you care about color richness and quality, DON'T buy a TN panel. Look for a PVA/MVA or S-IPS panel. - That mouse sucks. I haven't tried a Liteon keyboard but I don't have high expectations. Overall it doesn't seem to be a nicely balanced system. I'm not arguing about value-for-money. With that X1800 in it (and an All-In Wonder, no less), $1000's probably a good deal, but really that X1800 is the only thing that I like about the system.

(w00t) Iron Maiden (w00t) Dream Theater (w00t) Pink Floyd :D Steve Vai :D Joe Satriani :D Collective Soul Judas Priest AC/DC Van Halen Guns N Roses Pearl Jam :ph34r: Metallica :ph34r: Megadeth The Corrs

Linux, eh? I'm buying a PS3.

And what exactly does the word "crappy" have to do with C&C? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Have you played Tiberian Sun? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Fortunately, no. I stand corrected, I guess.

And what exactly does the word "crappy" have to do with C&C?

Ooooh... the bridge... I wouldn't go as far as to say that I got vertigo, but that location probably gave me the best perception of height I've ever had in a video game.