Father Xmas

Yea, graphics is pretty weak. The good news it's better than an integrated graphics processor. It's down with the 9400GT in lack luster performance.

The rest of the system looks fine. But I would expect that it has a minimally sized power supply like most basic Dell computers which would make graphic's card upgrades hard. Double that if it's a compact, slim-line case.

A 310M is a little on the low end. Something akin to the desktop nVidia 9400GT or G210. So no on the ultra mode graphics and you probably will have to run the game more on the low side of pre-UM settings as well.

The CPU is decent.

Well, we don't know what work is required to unlock them based on a booster flag Vs a vet date. But in terms of art assets, yes, not work required.

No, it should have one DVI to analog VGA adapter.

http://www.evga.com/PRODUCTS/enlarge...P3-1153-TR&I=3

Just pointing out to others what the 18 month costume reward was. Of course you knew but some of us don't know which vet reward is which off the top of our heads.

Why don't you just post CoH Helper output for both machines? It'll save the twenty questions.

That would be samurai boots. See if there's a corresponding pattern for the boot selected. Some costume pieces only allow a 2nd color if the matching pattern is selected.

I'm noticing a trend where the devs pipe in and acknowledge a problem exists instead of letting multiple threads complaining about a problem to stew for weeks until we see a patch note fixing it.

I like this new approach. Now we just have to wait to see if they follow through.

Maybe the Capn has synesthesia and mute makes sense?

I'm for making the Vet costume pieces a recipe drop, but not as common as the current temp power recipes or even the current costume recipes. The advantage of the Vet reward is not needing the recipe, having it at character creation time, etc.

I wouldn't do it for the shorter term vet rewards like the trenchcoat but 15 months and beyond, no skin off of my nose.

The booster idea is interesting too.

You rang.

Currently not excited by nVidia's offerings. They are still charging a premium for PhysX support. Add to that the fact the GTX 4xx line are horrible power hogs, that they have a huge gap in their lineup between the GTX 260 and the GTX 470, in both price and performance (GTX 465 is supposedly on it's way), it makes the basic HD 5850 a best buy anyway you slice it.

CPU wise I agree with you. Intel simply has the fastest CPUs on the market. The i5-750 quad performs almost as well as AMD's top offerings and most of Intel's older socket 775 quads. And that's the low end i5/i7 quad, they only get better from there.

Well if the MB was AMD 8xx based which have SATA 6Gb integrated as oppose to sticking on an external chip that gives you only two then I wouldn't have mentioned it.

But since the OPs original price target was $700 and he's drifted over it because of the switch to an AM3/DDR3 configuration as well as the much better video card, I was looking at where he could shave off a bit of up front, pre-rebate costs since post rebate the two MBs cost the same.

By XMas this year there is going to be plenty of USB 3.0 external hard drives on the market because USB 3.0 will finally give an external hard drive the performance very close to an internal one. But SATA hard drives are barely bumping into the 1.5Gb/s of the original SATA design and are no where close to the 3.0Gb SATA II standard. Maybe SSDs will eventually be able to use it but at 30-40x the cost per GB of a standard mechanical hard drives it's not something a user on a budget would normally be buying.

Ok, let me give you my tweaks on your latest parts list.

I would go with the GA-770T-USB3 motherboard, currently $80. The only difference is it doesn't have 6Gb SATA which I can't see anyone needing anytime soon but it still has USB 3.0 which I can see being useful.

Video Card. I have a huge problem with manufactures who market a card as a GTS 250 when they clock the GPU 9% slower and the memory 20% slower than the GTS 250 standard (GPU 675MHz Vs 738MHz, Memory 1800MHz Vs 2200MHz), which happens to be the same GPU speed as the 9800GTX and the same memory speed as the 9800GT. I consider the practice fairly dishonest. That said it's still the fastest nVidia card at that price at NewEgg. Probably twice as fast as the GT 240 I was suggesting in my previous post but only $30 more.

And that's the rub, there is a 20 card pileup at the low end of the price curve with huge differences in performance over a very narrow price range. Your original video card choice, the 9400GT was only $57. The underclocked GTS 250 pre-rebate is a tad over twice the price but is easily 5 times faster.

Actually if the OP doesn't have a lot of free memory that will hurt patch times as well. Also having a free core that can dedicate itself to the patching process also helps.

Then there's the way it estimates the amount of time left in the patching process. It's not as bad as Microsoft's copy time estimates but does tend to start off estimating that it'll take a good long time to finish and as the process goes on the estimate goes down faster than the actual time that's passed.

Remember the patcher will read every file, one at a time, into memory, calculate a checksum/md5/sha1 hash to verify the file is correct, apply a patch if needed, recalculate the checksum/md5/sha1 hash to verify the file is still correct and then write it back to disk. Every pigg file is rewritten to disk, even if it didn't change, which can fragment the pigg files (the largest one is over 300MB) if you don't have a lot of large blocks of free space on your hard drive.

I'm an old time tanker, back when they mattered.

Tanks could aggro entire mobs allowing his squishy teammates to AoE them to death.

Scrappers would simply go all Kenshin on them and before you can say boo the couple that are left can be managed by the rest of the team. Only problem is if the scrapper focuses on non minions and the minions swarm the squishy teammates. It's more exciting for the teammates to be sure but it does mean they usually need to lick their wounds while the scrapper descends on the next mob.

ParagonWiki: Power 10 Enhancements

Edit: damn my slow typing speed

You can find more videos to watch from this thread.

Well how the mighty have fallen. The development stall with the G9x family and the high prices with the GT200 series left manufacturers with a series problem when ATI finally got their hardware act together and came out with the HD 4xxx and HD 5xxx series of cards and slashed prices.

ATI had the right idea changed the game when they didn't try for the GPU crown and instead targeted the $200 price point. All nVidia could do is crow about PhysX and CUDA as they watched their market dominance slip away while the GTX 4xx series took forever to get done.

The same thing happened with AMD CPUs and the gamer market. Athlon 64s and X2s routed Pentium 4s and Ds. Then Intel came out with Core 2, which was twice as fast as the Pentium 4 cores and AMD had nothing. By the time fast Phenom IIs came out Intel was ready to move on to the i7 cores.

At least AMD has the sense to price their CPUs competitively relative to performance. nVidia still thinks that PhysX is worth an extra 20% premium.

A couple of things.

First a question. Do you want on board video and a microATX motherboard or were you simply going inexpensive? Personally I would spend $20-25 more and get an AM3/DDR3 motherboard/memory. DDR3-1333 Cas 9 memory is only $5-10 more than DDR2-800 Cas 5 nowadays and a nice basic socket AM3 motherboard can be had for $80.

The video card. If you chart $/framerate for video cards there are two places where the value is bad and that's top of the line video cards and the bottom of the line ones. The 9400GT falls into the second category. There are a couple of GT 240 cards from eVGA for $90 before rebates. We're talking at least a twice if not three times the performance.

Everything else is fine. Well the PSU is a tad overkill for the current parts list but you can't argue with the price.

I was going to suggest power supply. The important stat on PSUs is not the overall wattage but the wattage available at 12 volts. That's what the CPU and video card feed on. Older or cheaper PSUs tend to have more wattage available at 3.3 and 5 volts which isn't needed in today's PCs, which would likely use less than 50 watts between those two voltages.

If you could tell us the model and brand of PSU you have it would be helpful.

Muon

As for the difference between what's called single Vs dual channel memory modes, well it depends. With the size of CPU caches today plus advances in anticipating memory so the fetch can be started ahead of time we are only talking 5-10%. However if an application continually accesses a lot of data from memory, where caches don't help to hide the halving of memory bandwidth, then the impact can be quite large, over 20%. This includes applications like video encoding and 3D gaming.

PowerStream

Yes there's the "old" CM 690, which is a nice case and the "new" CM 690 II (basic and advance models). One of the things I like about the 690 II is a bit better cable management. More useful passthroughs for both power, drive and case cables. I also like that fact they moved the fan off of the side panel and stuck it on top (actually the front and top fans are bigger). I have yet to see a case with a fan in the side panel that has an easy way to connect/disconnect power from it and keep the cabling neat all at the same time.

I usually have the market messages up in a window and used it as confirmation that the bid or the drag and drop took.

No, in the world of computers things come in powers of 2. If you see a PC for sale with 6GB it's either an i7-9xx system with 3x2GB or a system with 2x2GB + 2x1GB. I have a feeling that Dell, HP and others have a warehouse full of 1GB sticks they are trying to get rid of or as just about every system including low end ones come with 4GB now, they are offering 6 and 8GB as a way to add perceived value and to signal a higher end product.

Why the desire for 6GB? Do a lot of Photoshop?