Father Xmas

Ironblade hit the highlights.

For Socket 1155, memory is needed in pairs, two pairs maximum. Only Socket 1366 use memory in sets of three. So for 8GB you are looking for something like this.

The "fixed" Socket 1155 motherboards are just starting to flow back into the mail order channel so they will be in very short supply for awhile. All the ones at NewEgg that I would consider seem to be sold out for the short term.

For the two graphics cards. The MSI card is slightly faster and has better cooling but vents the heat into the case. That shouldn't be a problem because the case you picked has a lot of ventilation. The eVGA card has a lifetime warranty and tries to blow the heat out of the case.

If you want to look at ATI, the HD 6870 is in the same price range ($210 before rebate) and generally performs faster, 10-15%, in a cross section of games. In this game in particular, I don't know which is better.

Both the PSU and the case are fine.

I'm sorry Smesh, you have my most sincerest apology. I strive to be accurate over on the tech forum and I admit I rushed looking back for the reference and saw it in your post but for some reason I didn't recognized the fact it was quoted from Rabid_Metroid.

Again I'm sorry.

Haven't seen or detected anything here since I added the launcher.

Girl Genius lost.

None of the links in this thread ever went to a Fox news article so I have no idea how that got inserted into this thread other than Smesh simply assuming that it must have been Fox News.

As I shown in a previous post that the original article was from AOL's finance page discussing Quaker Oats and simply mentioned about the White House push for better nutrition.

I don't have a problem hanging Fox News or any news service over shoddy reporting and made up crisis (videogame violence, (se)XBox/Mass Effect nonsense, net neutrality) but I will defend them when they aren't to blame (simply repeating a story from one of the news wires).

Google Crisis Response - 2011 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami - includes direct donation to Japan Red Cross.

American Red Cross - you can also SMS text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10.

The bulk of the death and destruction wasn't from the shaking of the 5th largest earthquake on record but from the tsunami that came later and overwhelmed the tsunami defenses of the cities along the coast. Most were designed to handle a 5-6 meters (around 20ft) but the wave was 8-10 meters. You've all probably seen the videos by now of the tsunami pouring the ocean over those barriers, wiping out everything short of reinforced concrete structures, pushing the debris field up to several miles inland.

Pile on top of that the nuclear power plant crisis. Note that iodine tablets have only been distributed to those evacuated around the plant, not the entire population of Japan as some sources imply. EDIT: This was a prophylactic measure in case there's a large release of radioactive iodine, not because their was. There hasn't been a massive release of radiation ala Chernobyl but it is elevated and will continue to spike and wane every time they release steam from those three reactors (yes reactor #2 is having cooling problems now). Primary containment is still intact.

Please also remember that fear and uncertainty is one of the best ways to market the news, keeps the folks tuning in.

Yep, around 11am their time. Three of the remaining four reactors on site were shut down for inspection before the quake so absolutely no problem with them. The remaining reactor seems to be cooling off okay with a system that uses natural heat convection to bleed off the excess heat.

Reactor 1 was a very early 2nd gen reactor and ironically was actually scheduled for decommissioning this month. Reactor 3 was also 2nd gen but with a somewhat better containment structure. It was scheduled for decommissioning in 2016.

Here is a pdf file about the reactor design used at that power plant, has a few nice cutaway diagrams of the reactor and it's containment structure.

No Chernobyl wasn't remotely a modern reactor design, was running at full power when it exploded and caught on fire and had no containment structure at all. The damage from the explosion prevented the core from being shut down fully by the control rods.

None of that has happened in Japan. All the reactors were successfully shut down but they lost some of the ability to thermally cool them off. The results are more similar to Three Mile Island than Chernobyl.

Boron is a neutron absorber. It should squelch any remaining fission going on in those reactors and the sea water, well it's readily available but it does mean those two reactors are now officially toast, meltdown or not.

As for the Daily Kos piece, there is better info in some of the comments that the piece itself.

Here is the news feed from the International Atomic Energy Agency about reactor problems in Japan. FYI CET is +1 UTC, Japan is +9 UTC, New York is currently with DST -4 UTC if you want to know what time events are happening.

Announced at PAX East.

/facepalm

Variations of that map have appeared all day at conspiracy, disaster, anti-nuclear web sites, but with different "official" logos and radiation values and units (easy to get wrong if you aren't schooled in radiation detection/measurement and just use wikipedia).

Somebody is having a busy day with Photoshop.

There are two sites, one with two reactors, one with three. Each site has a problem with one of their reactors. From my understanding the reactors were shutdown but the primary and backup cooling systems aren't working because ironically the power plants need external power to run them and the wave took out to much of the electrical grid infrastructure and damaged the diesel backup generators on site.

The pictures of the wave overtaking the Sendai airport was frighting to watch, as well as the car park full of new cars waiting to be shipped overseas being swept up, rearranged and from the pictures earlier today, are now on fire.

Tokyo is relatively intact with the biggest event across the bay in Chiba with a refinery on fire. The pictures this morning of that looked very much like a Kaiju film.

This map and this list of quakes on that map should give you all an idea how much activity is going on there. They had a Mag 7.2 foreshock two days before and six Mag 6.3 to 7.1 aftershocks with in 90 minutes of the Mag 8.9.

They just had another Mag 6.8 about 3 to 4 hours ago.

Honestly the integrated ATI 4200 on the motherboard of that Dell should be faster than your old FX 5200. The HD 5450 would be 3-5x as fast, similar to the old 6600GT.

In terms of today's video cards, you don't need something all that powerful to max out all of the non Ultramode settings. Something like the HD 5570 (an underclocked HD 5670 with usually much slower memory) could do the job at moderate resolution. But Ultramode effects are very GPU compute intensive. The HD 5770 has over 10x the raw compute power of the HD 5450 and over twice the power of the HD 5670.

The XPS use to be Dell's game line, then they bought Alienware and backed away from offering anything truly "gamer", such as systems capable of multiple video cards or overclocked CPUs.

If you are unwilling to spend the extra $130 to go from the HD 5450 to the HD 5770, then maybe the $50 to the HD 5670 may be more palatable. You should be able to play with some of the UM settings on their lowest settings.

Well you can flip to the rear camera in Facetime.

Maybe Apple has something like Google Glasses coming out or someone can use it for some other augmented reality app.

Maybe they are showing episodes out of order. Not like that hasn't happen before. With Ms M disguised as a human strikes me as the team dropping in on Wally in school.

Well the amnesia + bickering couple = couple plot device have been used so often there's probably a TVTrope for it, just don't want to venture there to look for it (or I'll be lost in there forever).

The boom tube was a nice twist.

I think the President said we have an "unshakable relationship with Japan" in a news conference about the quake and assistance.

Boy someone in the speech writing department is going to be in trouble.

I think it's the hesitation of some to install the NCLauncher due to some of the problems and horror stories about in here and on the Tech board with some posters talking can't getting live or the beta to work, needing to uninstall the game, etc.

Misinformation, climate of fear, fear of change, computers are scary, blah blah blah. Same old, same old.

Well the word is the original rumor was created by an Ad company trying to get hired by Quaker Oats by showing them how they could raise the public awareness of Capt'n Crunch through social media/gorilla marketing.

The story, of how CC was fading away, was then picked up by a finance website which speculated why Quaker would get rid of the brand and from there went mainstream news. And with each retelling, more "facts" got added to the story.

Cereal killing? Or mutiny? Neither! Cap'n Crunch lives

Oh, and the finance site that originally spun the White House angle, is an AOL site.

Nah, it's going to be Ms M hooking up with Aqualad and Artemis hooking up with Kid Flash and then they'll get their memories back and it'll be all embarrassing and stuff.

Your link to that motherboard says that product has been deactivated. Also it's not the B3 version.

The up to date one may be available someday at NewEgg, just not right now.

Sells Frankenberry or Booberry once a year. They only come out near Halloween and are unavailable the rest of the year.

In all honesty I would hold off the SSD for now. You can always install one later as the boot drive.

The reason to hold off is the "soon" to be released slew of SSDs based on the new Sandforce 2xxx series controller. SATA III with much higher throughput than even the Crucial 300 series, around 500 megabytes per second for read and write.

As for the case, I lean toward the 600T myself. The main reason for not using it in my $1350 Rig is the price, it's unit price is still $160 at NewEgg which is what I use to price my rigs.

What's important when choosing a case, at least for me are;

Fits the hardware I'm planing on installing (ie motherboard, video card, CPU heatsink);

Has the front ports I want, where I prefer them;

Has power supply at the bottom (makes the case less top heavy);

Has plenty of cooling;

Has good cable management which helps cooling and upgrades.

The rest, side window, LED fan colors, colors, materials or door over the external drive bays, is personal preference.

What isn't on my list is toolless assembly. A PC isn't a snap-fit model kit. If I put in a drive, video card or other expansion card, I want to screw them in securely and not rely on plastic clamps to hold parts in position. But that's me.