Father Xmas

I found 30 day Time Cards (in a DVD case) locked up at BestBuy and not on the shelf.

The Game Cards, which gives you the 30 day jet pack and allows you to start a new account were still hanging up with all the other "activate at checkout" cards. This was about a month ago, haven't been in a BB since.

Rankings based on chart from TechPowerUP (GTS 450 = 100) at 1920x1200 with AA across multiple games.
Price is lowest clock model of from either XFX or eVGA

GTS 450 - 100 - $140
HD 5770 - 120 - $135
GTX 460 - 165 (1GB model, 720MHz clock) - $200
HD 6850 - 167 - $180
HD 6870 - 194 - $225
GTX 560 TI - 204 - $250
HD 6950 - 220 - $265 for 1GB, $300 for 2GB
GTX 570 - 237 - $345
HD 6970 - 245 - $365

This should give you an idea.

Funny how that works, half the hardware, half the performance.

Actually TechPowerUP puts the HD 5670 at about 60% of an HD 5770 at 1920x1200 with AA and AF across a variety of games.

For $2K (assuming US $) you can build a tiny god of a gaming PC. Assuming you don't fret the money away on a $300 case weaved out of buckytubes laced with kevlar. And even then we are talking top shelf parts, multiple video cards, a stupidly high output power supply, an SSD boot drive , etc. just to get near $2K.

Anyways wait a month, by then the new Intel Sandy Bridge parts will be back, now that the chipset is fixed. Also Win 7 with SP1 DVDs should be available.

Here are a few references you can look at.
bit-tech.net's PC Hardware Buyers Guide
Tom's Hardware - Best Gaming CPUs for the Money
Tom's Hardware - Best Graphics Cards for the Money
AnandTech Bench - Benchmark Database

What a lot of people don't discuss is resolution and how that affects performance. Remember things like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering as well as the UM feature of ambient occlusion are done on a per pixel basis.

When people say the 5770 is twice as fast as the 5670, what they are comparing is the number streaming processors, texture units and raster units in the GPU. If you include clock speed then the 5770 is closer to 2.2x faster on paper.

More work with less horsepower means worse frame rate. Don't expect the HD 5670 to rock 1920x1080.

For the new hard shadows and water reflections, beware of cranking World Detail up as now it not only controls draw distance of objects but also the range that objects cast shadows and are used for reflections. Pre UM, you didn't need a beast of a video card to crank it up to 200%. Now with UM, leaving it at 200% can seriously groin kick your frame rate.

Now you know my pain when I first clicked on that headline. Wonder if Dr. Kaku will spend much time on terra and stellar forming in the verse.

In the sub $150 price bracket there's the nVidia GTS 450 and the ATI HD 5770. In a cross section of games, the HD 5770 is generally 10-15% faster. In this game, don't know.

They each are rated at around 100-110 watts max so no difference there. According to the specs you linked to you have a 400 watt PSU so that shouldn't be a problem.

Since we don't know what you have already for graphics, unless you are saying that you are relying on the integrated video that comes with the i5-650, in which case this will be way better.

Still you won't be able to crank UM settings to the max but you should be able to find some reasonably acceptable combination of pretty and frame rate.

The problem is the hardware settings is stored in the Window's registry and that's machine specific and is initially setup by the installer/updater. You could extract the games specific registry entry and load it on the new machine but I believe you will still need admin level privileges.

Now if you do get the game installed, pointing to the portable drive, you should know that USB 2 caps out at 30-35MB/s, compared to 80-100MB/s with the latest crop of SATA II, 7200RPM drives, so you may experience longer than normal load times. If your connection is eSATA or USB 3.0 this shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks to lack of scrubbing of Youtube I did get to see the two Symbionic Titan episodes I missed. Both were good as was this week's.

on cable, The Science Channel. And don't let this headline fool you.

Firefly returns to cable; Fillion says he'll play Mal again - Exclusive

For me one advantage is buffing the vet temp powers so they can land at higher levels. Yes it does poke a big ol' hole in the endurance bucket but you can fix that somewhat with the Performance Shifter Proc in Stamina.

I stopped at my public library this evening and ended up watching this. I had a very tough time not laughing so hard I would fall out of the chair. I had to pause it to catch my breath so I wouldn't snort while trying to suppress my laughter or feel the wrath of the people sitting at the next computer.

Well for all of us old timers Ms Martian is voiced by Winnie, Danica McKellar, math goddess.

Sounds like you are using a 32-bit operating system like XP or 32-bit Vista or Windows 7. Due to the way the PC is designed, devices like video cards, hard drive controllers, etc. gets first dibs on memory addresses. Any unused memory addresses are available to system memory. Since a 32-bit OS can only has 4GB of memory addresses, you will end up with less than 4GB of system memory even if you stick 4GB into your system. Commonly you will end up with 3-3.5GB depending.

However if you ever upgrade to a 64-bit OS, you will see all 4GB.

General rankings from Tom's Hardware.

Yes 16GB is a tad overkill considering non 64-bit programs (assuming you are on 64-bit Windows 7) still can't use more than 2GB.

Assuming you are interested in an upgrade and you want to stick with the nVidia, the $250ish new GTX 560 Ti is roughly 60-70% faster than the original 192SP version of the GTX 260, which is what you have. And the GTX 560Ti still uses around the same amount of power, actually a bit less. Even a stock clock 768MB GTX 460 would be roughly 15% faster.

System memory and video memory are two different things. Unless you are using an integrated graphics processor on the motherboard chipset that steals system memory.

Currently GDDR5 is the video memory of choice due to it's speed.

It's not dead, just one sub genre is currently out of favor or catching a breather while others step up to fill it's place.

Currently alien invasions or aliens among us seem to be popular (V, Battle LA, Super 8, I am Four). Let's not count out Fringe or Primeval. The going back in time to escape a dieing Earth series from Spielberg is starting up in May (to lazy to look up it's title) but it will have dinosaurs.

As others pointed out, space based series tend to be expensive to do without long term planning. B5 for instance was able to be relatively low budget because the season was planned out so far in advance that nothing really needed to be a rush job in the effects department.

Which ties into the problem that US viewers want their special effects to look as good as the latest big budget effects laden movie and that's simply not going to happen. So it's only going to be a few pretty good effects or a lot of 10 year old looking ones or recycling the effects done for the pilot.

I constantly see people refer to SciFi shows of the late 70s and early 80s as campy because of the quality of effects (as well as what passed for acceptable plots and pacing). Those shows weren't meant to be campy its just today's youth expect a much higher level in effects quality. They've simply been spoiled. Old Doctor Who wasn't campy, it was done on a shoestring budget.

OK, wrong memory for that CPU/MB combo. Only i7-9xx series wants it's memory in groups of three, everything else on the desktop wants it in pairs. So 12GB would require a pair of 4GB sticks and a pair of 2GB sticks.

Other that that the speed, type and voltage of that ram is fine, just not three sticks.

As for UM, that's more of a video card thing than a CPU/memory thing. And since you don't mention what you have currently for a CPU and video card, can't really say if you will be worse off or not.

But the real question is which 80s pop star will be teamed up with it.

Crabzilla

And Lex, Micheal Rosenbaum, will be back in the finale too.

I think the Performance Shifter one pops up on the healing channel.

Yes, once your Going Rogue character gets to level 20 in Praetoria they will be asked to choose to be a hero and go to Paragon or a Villain and sent the Rogue Isles.

Travel has gotten easier over time so even low level characters in Paragon of Rogue Isles may not be hoofing it to and from missions. Direct to mission teleporters, Pocket D teleporters, Ouroborus teleporters, base teleporters, market teleporters, unified tram and ferry systems (no dash in Steel or Skyway between stations in Paragon or between ferries in the RI anymore). Then you have players who practically live at AE (player designed mission center) or the markets.

This is on top of the already instanced missions so you have to go out of your way to find other players about the zones because you will rarely see them running from mission to mission anymore.

There are also a lot of old time players left so even zone events are rarely attended anymore. Trolls, ghosts, fires, the occasional Rikti invasion or Zombie outbreak is simply taken in stride, the way you rarely pay any attention to street crime anymore.

As DarkGob mentioned, the new level 50 content has been drawing the most attention lately which sadly means that there are fewer old timers around to help new players or fill PUGs.

There was also a time just after the market system was added that spam from gold sellers became a real problem. One way players tried to avoid spam was simply to hide from search while still being visible to friends and SGs. Eventually the majority of spam vanished but I'm not sure how many players bother to do a global unhide.

Sunday 8p EST, YJ and SW:tCW.

And hey, when did Symbionic Titan start up again? And on a Wednesday? Care to advertise guys, I thought the season was over after the run in on the GG floating base.

The OP didn't ask about UM and for $85 that really isn't an option.

If the OP doesn't mind mail order a quick stop at NewEgg does show a few possibilities.

On the ATI side of things, I think the best "modern" card you can get for that price limit is a 512MB HD 5670. The two gotchas is the card does draw 60 watts and they do, like nearly all video cards now, a heatsink/fan that extends into the next slot. The suggested PSU is 400 watts or better.

nVidia is a tougher nut. Compared to the HD 5670, the closest "modern" card in performance (though still slower than the HD 5670) is the GT 440. It has a similar power draw to the HD 5670.

Both of those is sticking within your $85 limit. However is you can push it to $100 and don't mind "older" Dx10 class cards Vs Dx11, and you have the PSU to handle it, then NewEgg still has a 9800GT and faster 512MB GTS 250 available. Both are a lot faster than either the HD 5670 or the GT 440.

On the ATI side they do have an HD 4850 for just under $100, again faster than either sub $85 cards, is a generation older and use a lot more power.

If you are talking the map pack you can get it off of sourceforge.

Oh and Herbert West was here.