Gorth

They would be long past their "Best By" date. Makes for bad omelette

Watching those protesters, you sort of get the urge to throw in a few extra tear gas grenades... eventually they will have to grow up, accept responsibility for their actions and live according to their means.

Retired parts: Antec TruePower Quatro 1000 PSU Asus P5E3 Premium WIFI - X48 chipset 2 * Corsair (2x2GB) PC-10600 (1333MHz) XMP DDR3 (8GB total) Intel QX9650 CORE 2 Extreme Quad Core (water cooled) Dead parts: Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870X2 w. 2 Gb DDR5 ram (tore off the stock fan (and the warranty) and equipped it with a cooling block from EK Water Blocks, Slovenia) Samsung 30" SyncMaster 305T+ Current parts: Antec Performance One P182 Antec TruePower Quatro 1200 PSU Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 Motherboard (water cooled) 12Gb (6x2GB) Corsair XMP DDR3 (running at 1600Mhz) Intel I7 960 (3.2GHz) (stock cooler) Zalman Reserator 2 Fanless Water Cooling System Creative PCI EXPRESS X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series Creative Gigaworks S750 7.1 Channel Speaker System - THX Certified 1 * Samsung Spinpoint F1 1 TB 2 * Samsung 500GB 'HD502IJ' 2 * Seagate 640GB 'ST3400320AS' Samsung 30" SyncMaster 305T+ (same model as the 'dead' one) Noname ATI Radeon 2400 OCZ Sabre Keyboard Vista Ultimate 64bit Various peripherals: Wacom tablet, Microsoft LiveCam, Microsoft 5 button mouse (very old), Saitek X52 Pro flight stick, various external HDD and USB sticks I'm not 100% sure about the HDD's anymore. Need to take them out and check the labels one of these days. To-do: Get a water cooling block for the cpu. Get a gfx card. Get a watercooling block for gfx card. Get Windows 7 and throw Vista out the Window

He hadn't had any food and water as far back as he can remember.

Cool. I hope you aren't a supertanker pilot, though. No worries. No oilspills are going to result from my nodding off at the keyboard, nor is anybody going to wake up with the wrong brain transplant A bit. Unfortunately, I am sort of between graphics cards and it showed. The hud was a mess, but to be fair, the game did warn me that the temporary card wasn't up to the task. Didn't figure out how to save a game though. Can it only be done at save points or did the botched up hud hide something?

A bunch of Llamasoft classics made available by their creator. Look under Softography and then 8bit/16bit/console (zero gen?) for downloads.

The original Elite game made available by one of its creators Look under Archives for emulator files and original source code (for those who wants to see how it was done)

Do you even have a day job? Where do you get the time to play all those AND patrol the boards? For me usually gaming sessions are 2-3 hours, but most days I don't play at all. And you are into Paradox games... care to share your secret for time dilation? Work days are between 10 and 18 hours and I have a lot of brief moments to check out forums at work. Then I have a few hours at home to read things that caught my attention more closely or to game, although I don't do it as regularly as I did a decade ago. I can easily spend a week not touching a game. Sometimes I sleep at night, sometimes not

James Bond is the only one of the three 'B's I know Probably as good a starting point as any. Kill a few bosses, blow up their bases and sail towards the sunset on a raft with the current Bond girl

I know/knew Red Faction, as I had it way back. The box seems to have gone missing during a relocation somewhere I tried Red Faction 2 for short while (back when it was new) and found it horrible, lacking the (admittedly artifical) sense of freedom of the first one with small, cramped levels and weird vehicle minigames. I haven't seen RF Guerilla, only heard about it. A bit more than $20 for the bundle, so if it turned out to be awful, it's no big loss. DMC4 was because I wanted to try out an action/platformer game (and give my usb xbox360 controller something to do) and it seemed like the only one of its kind that they had for sale Otherwise point and click stuff, RTS (the sword of the stars stuff) and a racing game (with destructable cars of course)

Trying to expand my horizon a bit beyond the usual crpg/strategy stuff. Did a bit more shopping, trying out game genres that are usually outside my field of vision. Got the following to try out: Crash Time 2 Devil May Cry

My IELTS is on the 8th and 9th of May Your first language isnt English? What is it? Danish... second language German... third language English... and a smattering of French as a backup language @Steve: I don't remember the required score, nothing outrageously though (not academic level)

My IELTS is on the 8th and 9th of May

Maybe he used one of them Monty Python Hungarian/English dictionaries?

Oh look, those nice guys at Gigabyte provided the motherboard with a stock watercooling block on the Northbridge Yeah, finally got to unpack some of the boxes, just to realise that I forgot to order a wireless netcard (my old/current motherboard has it built in). Time to go shopping in one of the local retail stores over the Weekend.

I hope it was just bad luck... as the warranty goes out the window when you start taking it apart and put your own cooling on it Thats a hefty model that Toxic. Takes a more serious gamer than me to even consider the crossfire option though. I'm a casual gamer at best (usually playing more old than new games), but fast OpenGL is a godsend for previewing scenes in my 3D apps, the latter also being what I need the processing power and memory for.

Well, a good thing that I still have a couple of weeks to think about it. I wasn't too impressed by the manufacturing quality of the Sapphire card* and my trust in Asus plummeted like a rock with the motherboard that I'm in the process of retiring (I kept running into stability issues until I downclocked it from 1333 to 1111 which is a bit of a joke). Gigabyte is a completely unknown brand for me, my new MB being a first. Well, got most of the parts for my upgrade stacked under my desk here at work. Need to take a taxi to work one of these days so I can get them home and start assembling it *the metal "front" plate was placed all wrong, making it impossible to use monitor port 1 (because it was pressed too tightly against the casing) and I needed non standard screws etc. to actually get it fastened to anything. Sloppy design or sloppy construction, don't know. A lifespan of less than 2 years wasn't too impressive either.

Bullfrog... R.I.P. They made some awesome games. I remember playing Populous and Syndicate on my Amiga.

Sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. While I think that all the 5970s are reference designs -id est the stock coolers, clocks, etc.- you might want to make sure as non-reference designs can make one type better than other. XFX, if they make that card yet, is another company you might want to look at since their double-lifetime-guaranty, basically a transferable-warranty, might help if you ever want to re-sell the GPU (or simply need to REM it down the line, most cards come with more stringent time-limits). Hope this helps. Warranty is probably a moot point for me, as one of the first things I do is take it apart, throw away the fan etc. and put a full sized watercooling block on it (I run it out of the box for a fortnight first to catch any doa or other obvious errors)

Anybody knows of any significant differences between Gigabyte, Asus and Sapphire when it comes to the same GPU? I.e. they all currently make 5970 cards, specs look similar, prices look similar etc. Same card with a different sticker slapped on it?

Did you play Battlefield Vietnam? Did you download the free Battlefield 1942 pacific add on for it? Basically the same levels except on the same engine as Battlefield Bad Company which means destructable buildings and cover. I think they dumbed it down a bit too much though. You have infinite ammo for ALL weapons including bazookas in grenades. Not quite as horrible as it sounds: You get 3 rockets for your rocket launcher, once you fire/reload all 3 you then have to wait about 20-30 seconds to get another 3 rockets. Also, the classes have been combined to make 3 classes from the original 4-5. Also, to be a bit of a geek, I find it incredibly annoying that they don't give the Japanese their actual rifle. Why are they using a German Mauser? Just skin an Arisaka rifle. It would work identically! Yeah, I have both Battlefield 1942 (plus Road to Rome) and BF Vietnam (the music brings back childhood memories) + the Pacific Addon. Hmm, I might just pass on this then. Maybe wait and see if they make a demo of it.

I'm mildly curious about Battlefield 1943 (because I loved BF1942). If it is just a console version of 1942 re-released on the PC with a few bells and whistles, I won't bother. Sometimes hope dies last.

No

According to Berlusconi because the left has uglier women

http://www.newsweek.com/id/236096 Will attempt to respond more fully later. That is both good and bad, isn't it? Those guys are supposed to be better than other people.