Father Xmas

More of a classic Thor look but I wouldn't put it past them to make the sleeves materialize as he goes into combat.

Merit Rewards

Still no info if the preexisting booster packs will be available at the store for an equivalent number of points ($9.99 pack for 800 PP) or are we forced to go a la cart.

It's not a problem with the store. I've never had a problem buying multiple things from them at the same time. And I know many others don't have problems.

As for why so many people do, don't know. Type of card, newness of card, proximity to expiration date, who knows? Their is a settable limit on how much you can buy per day tied to your account but I think that's set at $100 as default.

Link

Photon, I think you are misremembering. The "spandex man's suit" top still needed to use the Sleeves version of the gloves to look correct and since that's a separate piece, it has it's own colors.

However there are several pieces where the primary/secondary are swapped between the top and bottom. It could be possible that was also the case with the "Sleeves" and the "suit".

I would check but all of my characters that used those pieces from 2004 have been upgraded to use the new shirt/tie + jacket parts.

PCIe V1 is 4GB/s while PCIe V2.0 is 8GB/s. The standard is designed to fall back to PCIe V1 if either the controler on the motherboard or the card is PCIe V1.

As for impact to performance, it's negligible.

Since you couldn't be bothered to join the rest of us in the weekly threads about SyFy Mondays I'll reply here.

Yes it's an often used plot when speciation of mankind is the theme. The dominate species of man tries to eliminate or control the new emergent species while the emergent species divides into two factions. It happened on the 4400, Heroes, Alphas, Darwin's Radio/Darwin's Children, Babylon 5, etc. Heck you could even make an argument that theme existed in Atlas Shrugged between the "minds" and the rest of society.

Nothing to see here.

If the FF can get a sequel then why not GL?

In the short term I was going to swap the HD 6950 for a GTX 560Ti because of all the AMD driver hassles. In the medium term I was waiting for the Z68 motherboards to drop it price because of it's SSD caching capabilities (add an 64GB or less SSD to the system and it can act as a cache for the larger, slower hard drives).

Can't really think what else it's missing that could extend it's life. Already has 8GB of memory, the CPU is plenty fast but I guess you could go to the i7-2600K which adds hyperthreading (8 virtual cores Vs 4 actual cores of the 2500K) and 1/3 more Level 2 cache (8MB Vs 6MB) and slightly higher clockspeed (which if you plan to overclock is sort of moot). But it's $95 more than the i5-2500K. And there is some merit in buying the fastest video card you can afford today to make it last as long as possible. On the other hand there is also merit in buying a reasonably priced video card now and upgrade it more frequently than the other parts of the system. And on the gripping hand there is always getting a second card (assuming games other than CoH) and going SLi or CrossfireX.

We probably could relate it to the Nazi moonbase and their flying saucers of doom.

Not sure if that's intentional or simply the writers not agreeing on the character. I like the fact that some of the most advance Alphas in mental abilities appear to the average person as extremely dysfunctional. It's an interesting take.

Also DDOSing Gary. Wasn't expecting that.

W13 was good. Expanding on Pete's and Jinx's history. And Artie is happy that Claudia is bonding with Jinx. Ain't that special.

And of course Eureka. Sort of called it on the safe deposit boxes.

I see in Sho's SDCC photos an entire Young Justice action figure line so I would think it's coming back.

Still ticked about Sym-bionic Titan.

The GTX 560 is essentially an heavily overclocked 1GB GTX 460. It's not as bad as the performance gap between the GTX 460SE vs the 1GB GTX 460.

Then again the GTX 560Ti isn't that much more. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Anything is better than that Intel integrated graphics. You might be able to pull off a GT 430 or a HD 6570 but due to the tiny PSU either the GT 520 or HD 6450 are very low wattage cards. There are two versions of the HD 6450, the one with GDDR5 is normally clocked higher in addition to the faster memory. Note you will need low profile video card because it's a 530S as in SLIMLINE. This also means swapping PSUs is a big problem. It may be a TFX12V type of PSU but without one to look at I can't say for sure.

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EDIT: It is a TFX12V. This PSU seems like a popular replacement. 250 watts of 12V power, 80Plus Bronze rated. NO PCIe power connector but really wasn't expecting one. Rated well at JonnyGURU.
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On the other hand you could go the fugly route and use a traditional ATX12V PSU and run the cables into the case after ripping the 250 watt PSU out. Downside is you may be down an exhaust fan for the case.

As for memory, it should have 4 ram slots for a maximum of 4GB but it could only have 2. You should crack it open to check it first.

Oh BTW, here's the manual.

Case and PSU are fine.

I do have a question about your drives, PATA (80 pin cable) or SATA or a mix of the two? Reason to ask is more and more modern motherboards are losing support for the old PATA drives and even if they do support them, they only have one PATA connector.

Socket 775 is essentially dead and buried. While NewEgg still has loads of CPUs, a $210 dual core E8500 has the same performance as the $125 dual core i3-2100, Socket 1155 CPU while the same $210 will get you the quad core i5-2500.

Now you could go real cheap and get the 2nd gen Core 2 based Pentium E6500 with is around 10-15% faster than your current CPU for $80. I really hesitate suggesting any of the more expensive models because that CPU socket is such a dead end.

The obvious alternative is the upgrade the "guts", motherboard/memory/CPU, to one based around DDR3 memory and Socket 1155.

DDR3-1600 memory is now around $10 a GB, installed in pairs like your current motherboard.

A nice P67 based ATX motherboard that can do either nVidia SLi or AMD Crossfire (suggesting this simply because your current MB supports SLi) can be found in the $150-200 range. If you only ever plan to use one video card then you can shave off a few bucks.

Now I've already listed the i3-2100 and the i5-2500 but if you have a hankering for overclocking the CPU, you will need the i5-2500K for $225. Socket 1155 is extremely locked down against previous overclocking methods and you need to get the premium K series CPU to do any serious overclocking. The dual core i3-2100 is roughly 50% faster than your dual core E6600 in CPU benchmarks.

That means you could easily upgrade the guts to a quad core with 8GB of DDR3 in a new Socket 1155, P67 based motherboard for around $500. Of course 8GB doesn't help if you are still using a 32-bit OS, a OEM copy of Win 7 Home, 64-bit costs $100.

As for video cards, your GT 240 was already low middle end when it came out. At the very least I would recommend a 1GB GTX 460 (not SE version, yuck). They are around $170-220 before rebates. It's about 2.5-2.7x faster than the GT 240 according to TechPowerUP across a wide variety of games. The next step about that, IMO, is the GTX 560 Ti. It's price starts around $240 before rebates and is roughly 25-30% faster than the 1GB GTX 460.

That's a few of my thoughts on upgrading your current rig.

It's funny that I read a couple of weeks ago that the world population has passed peak youth, that the world population of the young (don't remember the age) is now going down. That the whole world is now past it's "baby boom" years as more of world lives longer, increasing the median age upwards.

It's been shown that as a country becomes more industrialized, shifting from a manual agricultural society, as well as better medical care birth rates plummet. World growth rates are now fallen to a fraction over 1% per year and is still falling.

Problem is when a new feature is added to the game that has items that you can purchase, a new currency is added to prevent old timers who may have a lot of the previous currency(ies) available to them from getting a head start.

Start with inf.
Add Bases, add prestige. Prestige is attached to SG and not to character.
Attempt to level out trial and TF rewards, add Merits.
Add Vanguard, add V Credits for Vanguard items.
Add AE, add tickets.
Add side switching, add Hero/Villain Merits.
Add incarnate, add shards/threads
Add incarnate only items, add Astral/Empyrean Merits.

And we aren't talking about annual event only rewards like candy canes or Halloween masks.

Most of the non inf currencies can't be traded.

Now PR takes the place of Vet rewards but there is an indirect way to get them with real money. PP is the microtransaction currency which is real money. Both are account and not player based.

The redirect sounds like a problem at your end because they work fine for me. Here are the non-tiny URLs.

$725 $1350

It's been pointed out at least twice that actress Molly Quinn showed up to one of the Castle panels dressed as Mal Reynolds from Firefly (Nathan Fillion played Mal and plays Molly's father on Castle).

Well she rocked a few other costumes at SDCC.

Went the extra step with the red contacts for Shana from Shakugan no Shana. The original Star Trek female uniform was from last year's SDCC.