Father Xmas

Well there is the Hierarchy Chart from the most recent Tom's Hardware "Best Graphics Card for the Money". It gets updated once a month as new cards are released.

Then there is the Performance Summary Chart from the latest video card review at techPowerUp. As long as you remember that the chart is normalized for the card that's being reviewed, you get a good idea of a card's general performance.

Yea, integrated video is really only good for running Aero and playing back video.

And as for the 850 part, well those ranks are within families and not necessarily across them. Very true with ATI cards as the differences between the 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx and 5xxx families are so great.

This is where Tom's Hardware's handy rankings come into play. Just look for the HD 3850 desktop card on the ATI column. It shows the HD 4670 to be of similar performance.

What the chart doesn't show is the new HD 5670 that just came out last month. It's a bit faster than the HD 4670 so when the chart is updated it may be on a higher tier.

The HD 4670 is around $75 at NewEgg.

What did you have as a video card before?

Well the 9500GT isn't bad for lower resolutions, like 1280x1024/1366x768/1440x900. It's a little slower than the older 8600GTS (the 9500GT with DDR3 memory). That said Ultra Mode seems to be targeted at gamers with much higher end video hardware.

Sorry about that. And don't use 80, I don't think that works anymore. The problem is the default port 6994 is in the default range for most BitTorrent apps and all it takes is one router between you and the download servers monkeying with transfers using that port address to cause problems.

First, you can stop the updater without losing track where you are in the download. There are multiple download servers, maybe you are stuck on a slow one.

Second, you can edit the updater shortcut's target line to choose a different port for the download. The default is 6994, try 13094 or 23094. Details can be found here.

Edit: Oops, wrong link.

Good news, bad news.

Bad News, those restrictions, price, Core 2, dedicated video, does limit the selection a lot.

Good News, now that the mobile Core i3, i5 have hit the market, the mobile Core 2 laptops are discounted to clear out stock.

NewEgg spat out these as possibilities. NewEgg has a nice viewer that allows you to zoom in and take a look at the keyboard layout (6-12 pictures for each, usually one is a look at the keyboard layout). Just select one and then click on the big picture, that will bring up the viewer.

General differences of the three in stock.
T6600 - 2.2GHz, 2MB cache, 800MHz FSB.
P7350 - 2.0GHz, 3MB cache, 1066MHz FSB, lower power.

I'm going to say it's a toss up between the two in performance, trading clock speed advantage for a faster memory subsystem.

nVidia 130M - A fare sight better than integrated.

Random points. First, a larger diagonal screen generally means there is space for a larger keyboard spread, sometimes. The two Acers appear to use the same keyboard, the larger screen just means there is more space to the left and right of the keyboard. Second, you may want to go with the screen with less resolution than more for gaming because of the modest power of the GPU.

I use Avira AntiVir. It does open a "Would you like to by the full product?" ad when it updates it's signatures but it's pretty reliable and has very low impact on the system.

Oops, should have realized it was a laptop driver. Still version 186 is a bad driver for this game.

So you try downloading this driver from nVidia and try to install it or are you simply using Windows Update (or whatever Win 7 has)?

And Team_SG1, you will get better results if you didn't threadjack someone else's thread. You've done that twice so far.

Update your video driver. Version 186 does that.

And actually it's a lot like the CISC / RISC debates of the 90s. Both companies have taken different approaches to the same problem and a lot has to do with the driver's ability to "compile" the various shaders to take best advantage of the underlying hardware.

The thing is even though ATI was the first to have software that allowed BOINC style projects like Folding@Home to take advantage of the their hardware, it appears that nVidia is striving for the HPC (High Performance Computing) market with their new core after it's success with the G200 in that market. The market for uber video cards for gaming is relatively small but the market for inexpensive "super" computers is a growth market.

The problem is simple, farming for purple recipes drops also causes influence to drop. So is selling of unwanted "poor" set or common IO recipes to the market. To much money chasing to few goods equals inflation. Inflation causes players to farm for influence. Rinse and repeat.

Welcome to virtual Zimbabwe, add these extra zeros to this month's currency.

Well some of that article is incorrect and it reads more like a Team nVidia rah rah piece. Benchmarks don't lie, the HD 5850, which has 10% less computational units than the HD 5870, still beats the GTX 285 in a lot of actual game testing and for $80 less.

ATI's only problem is not having a card to compete with the GTX 260/216 for around the $225 price point. The HD 5770 is a bit slower and the HD 5850 is a lot more expensive.

Oh and one thing they left out of their piece. Four out of five on the processors on the ATI card can do 64-bit floating point (FP) math, two operations per clock cycle. The current nVidia G200 based cards have one 64-bit unit for every eight of their 32-bit units, or only 30 on the G200. And if you just consider standard 32-bit FP math, the GTX 285 has a peak of 1116 GFLOPS, the HD 5870 has a peak of 2720 GFLOPS.

Rule of Five

Edit: oops, misread the question

Every game I enjoy have this, that items, powers, units, whatever have pluses and minuses to them in an attempt to balance them while giving a sense of variety. This is simply one aspect of IOs, the higher the level they are, the greater the level range where their bonuses vanish. This is on top of crafting costs or ED ringing away part of those higher than SO enhancement value.

What's happening now is buying remorse, now that SSKing is forcing pimped out 50s to play at levels where their IO bonus fail, unless they are purped out level 50s.

Another place is Puget Systems but they are pricey but great support.

Digital Storm strikes me as all about the overclocking and the gamer bling. But it bothers me that Digital Storm doesn't really tell you much about the PSU other than it's wattage.

Yes, sadly IDE is going and on some motherboards, including some made by Intel, are totally gone. Another gotcha is if you are still using wired keyboards and mice that use a PS/2 style connector instead of USB. Some motherboards come with only one PS/2 connector and again on some Intel built motherboards, none at all.

This will give you an idea about the performance difference between an Athlon X2 and an Athlon II X2.

I bet it's the tablet problem. Not sure what to do about it, I never had a tablet but I remember a problem with tablet drivers and this game.

Click on the link Panzer provided (one problem with the new forums is that links aren't as obvious as they once were).

There is a hotfix for the 9.12 ATI drivers. Here is a direct link to them.