metadigital

I have a few pin-stripe suits ... I was even thinking of buying a bowler hat ... "

If you live in a $100k house, then you don't buy a $10k watch. If you have several $20million mansions in various cities, like Monte Carlo, NY, London, Venice, etc, and a garage full of cars like Ferrari, Maclaren Bentley and Maybach, then spending $1m on a Patek Phillippe that your great-grandson can hand to his great-grandson might be a worthy purchase. And Velcro? Man, get a new wallet ... that just screams VAGRANT.

Sure, no argument. As the reviewer said: best to get a new mobo and only get the 7800GS if you can't afford that. False economy? Probably. I can't see many more AGP GPUs released (either this one or the 7900GS, if it ever is), so this where the two companies will make their exit statements, methinks; y'know, the last word in AGP (who made what was the best). It'll probably take most of the year for the dust to settle (read: prices reach a reasonable level) after the two release their 2006 offerings (in Summer, I expect), so I am in no hurry. By the time I am ready to buy there will be no doubt as to what is best value/money.

THIS is what you really want.

I would honestly wait; the new Intel chips will be based on the cooler Pentium M design and should give the next gen Athlon some decent competition in gaming. (Intel's last gen chips were best, hands-down, for video encoding). PCI-E is a must on any new motherboard, as AGP won't support any newer graphics cards, more than likely (only just got the 7800GS). If you must buy a new motherboard, the best tested by Custom PC (coincidentally this month's cover story, tested 19 ), was: [*]Intel the Asus P5WD2-E Premium (

Actually, RAID 5 is the only unusable one, the one businesses stay *away* from " You get the worst of both worlds, crappiest performance and some loss of disk space (although the wasted space becomes less proportionally with more disks). If you want redundancy, you use RAID 1, if you want speed you use RAID 0, if you want speed and redundancy you use RAID 1+0 (which is an awful lot of disks). RAID 5 is the red headed step child which you can use for archive storage systems (where performance isn't critical), but thats about it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Gee, all those Fortune 100 companies that I worked for must be very silly to use RAID 5, then.

Not sure why you think that the AGP slot won't take the strain, perhaps you might like to provide some evidence? For my part, this is all I know about the 7800GS:

I was under the impression that the ME franchise trilogy was being created all at once, like one big game delivered in three parts. (Hey, maybe that is a way for studios to deal with the increased cost of production: multi-generational games ... hmmm ... )

I've noticed that PC Gamer are occassionally guilty of hyping the hell out of something when it is released, only to row back a few paces in the next issue (usually when a flood of reader feedback pours cold water on their hyperventilating reviewer). The biggest problem in Morrowind (to me) was the bajillion fed-ex missions and the fatigue-throttled slow walking around the map.

Baulder's Gate 2!

I have been given, and in turn handed out, punishments like holding books in outstretched hands for periods upwards of an hour. Not to mention latrine duty in cadets (very useful for inveterately poor behaviour ...) or just making sure shoes are polished for inspection, etc.

Watch the old version, with Colin Firth

I would just like to annouce that I have purchased The Wizard Knight (Gene Wolfe) and I am looking forward to reading it ... all 920 closely typed pages of it ... :D

I don't understand why you are upset ... are games liable to be censored by your government?

I love the super patriotic banner. Oh and I learned something too! ALL gamers are in the States apparently. Wow! <_< <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It is a US initiative, doofus.

Can you run two 6800s in SLI with AGP (can't remember off-hand)? Also, isn't there a 7 series for the AGP out now? 7800GS or something? *goes to google* Yep

Both those statements would appear to be true.

The latest cards will run the next generation of games very well: the ATi in particular are utilising unified shader technology that allows for better optimisation of transitor real estate (sharing between initial texture vertex shading and eventual bump-mapping iterations); this technology is only just starting to be used by the X1xxx generation.

Damn, I already bought Chaos Theory! *shakes fist at Ubisoft*

Kaftan FTW!

Oxysavant? :cool:

Meaning that the Germans weren't operationally ignorant ... okay, try this: how can Blitzkrieg work without operational acumen? Co-ordinating all forms of assault into one ruthlessly efficient man

Ask not what TOMBS can do for you, but what you can do for TOMBS ... :D

I like to reward the shareware system by purchasing software (that I like) that is released for free trial.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that staggered purchasing of hardware is a better strategy? Possibly. But nevertheless, all costs are falling, year-on-year.