Father Xmas

Okay, this is a list of all contacts on the CoH side (looks to be missing Croatoa and the Midnight Squad contacts however). You unlock one contact per origin type for that level range. You can't get Juan and Linda for instance. It doesn't matter as they give you the same set of missions.

I believe that once you've been handed off by your starting contact, it's this next level that will introduce you.

I haven't done a lot of low level contacts in Kings Row myself anymore after I unlock and run the safeguards to get the jet and zero-g packs, I'm pretty close to level 10 and able to get Steel and Skyway contacts.

It's easy to get all the contacts (I'm assuming you mean the 5, one of each origin per 5 level range). Doing all their missions and arcs, not without turning off XP.

Hi/bye Mid.

[waves]

Miss you kid.

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To be honest, most of the time I look at benchmark reports they seem like they're written in greek. My hope was that I would end up with a system that booted MUCH faster and didn't have any degradation in other areas of performance.

If it is going to make only a minor difference in boot, then I may be better off with a 10,000 RPM raptor.

Thanks for the information!

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Two things determine a conventional mechanical hard drive performance.

First how many bits of data that fly under the head per second. This is determined by bit density of the drive platter and how fast the drive spins.

Second, how quickly the drive can position the head to where the data, access time. This is also affected to some degree by how fast the drive spins.

This is why 10,000 RPM Raptor drives usually perform better than ordinary 7,200 RPM drives.

Obviously SSD drives don't spin or have a mechanical head to reposition. This means it's limitations in performance have more to do with the flash chips used, the SSD controller and the SATA 3.0Gb/s interface.

The good news is that SSD drives don't have to worry about conventional file fragmentation hurting performance. Virtually no seek times. However SSD drives suffer another problem that they are just starting to figure out a decent work around for.

While they can write data to unwritten areas of the flash quickly and in small chunks (4KB), writing into an area already written to but marked as deleted take a lot longer because Flash chips can only erase data in large chunks (512KB). So the SSD has to read all the non erased data first, cache it, erase the entire chunk and write out the cached data before it can write the data chunk you were trying to write out in the first place. On less expensive SSD drives this can seriously affect performance.

This is partially why there was something of a scandal when the Intel X25-M performance was shown to plummet after it was used for a while. Intel had a method that worked very well, up to a point, but then the performance dropped back to what other higher end SSDs had. Now Intel haven't fixed the Flash chips, probably nobody ever will, but Intel did come up with a better way of handling the cache/erase/rewrite problem. Others are starting to as well. Microsoft and SSD manufactures are also talking about including an optimization in the Win 7 file system to help SSD drives in general.

While the price of the X25-M has dropped a lot in the last 9 months ($324 for 80GB version at NewEgg), and while it does very, very well on specific types of benchmarks, doesn't significantly improve the everyday user experience. You can get more than 10x the drive space for less than 1/3rd of the money.

Take the money you save and donate it to charity, take your SO out for a nice evening, take the kids to an amusement park, buy some neat little gizmo that would be the envy of all your friends or stick it in the bank for a rainy day. All would be better uses of that money.

SSDs are the future but they're not quite there yet.

Around 2.5GB (guesstimate). Pretty much all the game files have changed numerous times since the Collector's Edition DVD.

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I never understood what RAID cards do. Can either of you help me on that one? Because I'm looking at a MoBo that has only AGP slots and that seems limiting but the possibilities for performance are quite nice. And things are saying RAID 1 2 or other types of raid cards help but with what? And they only work in PCI slots? PCIe maybe? A little confused on this.

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RAID stands for Redundant Array of Individual Drives. The I use to mean Inexpensive.

RAID is a way, usually, to provide a more robust and faster performing drive subsystem than single drives.

The difference from motherboard based RAID and RAID cards, is that RAID cards handle the grunt work with complex RAID configurations instead of your CPU. It provides better performance.

RAID 0, what gamer systems tend to configure, shouldn't be considered RAID on the grounds that the loss of a single drive wipes out the entire drive array. Can't really call that redundant now can you.

That's only the case with Core i7 motherboards. The current Core i7 series of CPUs prefer triple channel, alternating between three banks of identical memory (same size, speed and timings) to maintain a high bandwidth to memory. They can be run in single or dual channel modes with some to a lot of loss in performance.

The the MB chipset used for Core 2 CPUs are dual channel, alternate between two banks of identical memory for best performance.

With the Core i7, like the Athlon 64 and Phenom CPUs, memory is connected directly to the CPU and not through the Northbridge chip on the motherboard. This makes them independent of the chipset used when determining what kind of memory and arrangement is needed.

Multi socketed MBs are found at NewEgg under Server Motherboards. Note that not only they are considerably more expensive than single socket motherboards, so is the memory and the CPUs. Also due to space limitations, four socket motherboards don't have the kind of slots you are looking for. Most don't even have audio because they are a SERVER MB.

You want a lot of CPU power? Get a Core i7. It's a quad core but with HT the OS sees eight. Applications that are designed to use as many cores as possible simply adore Core i7s. Computer rendering, video compression, science and engineering simulations all think it's the cat's meow. This compares the $310, 3.0GHz Core2 Q9650 to a $280, 2.66GHz Core i7-920. With the exception of limited threaded games, the 11% slower clocked Core i7 eats the Q9650 for lunch.

The problem is the server version of that chip (2.66GHz, Core i7 based), which allows multiprocessor communications, cost $1000. Drop two of those into a $400-600 dual socket 1366 motherboard, add in 12 GB of DDR3 ECM memory and you are approaching $3000 without the video cards, case, PSU, etc.

For a ridiculous build list, here, Ars Technica's God Box. Around $9400 for just the rig, no monitors, keyboard, mouse, speakers. For that amount of money you could build three or four really really nice single processor rigs.

No there is only two CPU intensive threads in the game. So you should still be able to run your other CPU intensive app in the background.

I foolishly slotted according to recommendations in the original Prima guide which suggested diversification. I wondered at the time why the scrapper several levels lower than me was always doing massive damage.

Exactly. I've used it on AV/EBs since those are extended fights, at least if you're a tank. Don't remember missing in those one on one cases.

Well if you go to Crucial's website, they list all of their memory that they guarantee compatible to the Striker II Extreme. Crucial is owned by Micron. After spotting the memory you like, go to NewEgg and compare manufacturer's part number before buying.

Actually you can do this method with other major memory providers, most have selection wizards to point you to the right memory for your motherboard and then you can simply lookup the part on NewEgg.

As for Asus's QVL (Qualified Vendor List), I'm unsure if that's for memory at their rated speed or memory they know their board can OC to DDR3-1600 and up.

It's 1% for the first and 0.6% for each additional critter hit. It's the +15 end gained per critter hit that makes this an attractive power. It is meant to be used in crowds.

Not sure if it's auto-hit or not but I don't remember missing all that much if I did.

Well the GDN retired my tanker, switching to blasters and regen scrappers (figuring that after the 2nd or was it the 3rd balancing of regen would have finally gotten it right so it was safe, I was wrong) so I didn't get back to my tank until after ED hit so I was spared doing a respec on my character twice.

Good, but still, a pixel or two wide "bookmark", while looking unique in an icon editor, is indistinguishable on a high resolution monitor, colorblindness or not.

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when attempting to launch the game on my new laptop i get the follwoing
You card or driver doesn't support GL_ARB_multitexture
You card or driver doesn't support GL_ARB_texture_compression

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This means a botched driver install, damaged driver or driver settings that disabled OpenGL extensions the game uses. So I suggest a uninstall, driver cleaning and reinstall of your video driver.

There we go, first number is OS;

4 - Win 98/Me
5 - Windows 2000
6 - XP
7 - Vista

the 2nd number is Direct X compatibility;

10 - Direct X 5
11 - Direct X 6
12 - Direct X 7
13 - Direct X 8
14 - Direct X 9
15 - Direct X 10

So I'm guessing that a 8.15 driver means it's meant for Windows 7, Direct X 10 support.

Human Sexuality at a co-ed college is always a fun class.

Oh wait... never mind.

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There are main/major story arcs, they are marked by a book with a blue bookmark and border. There are mini/minor story arcs, they are marked by a book with a green bookmark and border.

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Use a magnifying glass to see the difference. (Someone should nerf bat the artist who did this, it was a lot easier to tell with either an entire red or yellow book)

You can also hover the cursor over the book and it should tell you if it's a mini arc or not.

Cherokee, the player who originally set up the wiki, TonyV, moved it to wikia when he couldn't give it the attention it needed. However wikia eventually became inundated with RMT ads as well as edits by those same RMT groups to encourage use of their services and so it was moved to the Titan Network, cleaned up and eventually they were able to reclaim the ParagonWiki URL, the original URL for the site, from wikia.

The wikia version of the wiki is a den of scum on villainy and not in a good wholesome CoV way.

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Video Device Name: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
Manufacturer / Chip: NVIDIA / GeForce 8800 GTX
Video Memory: 2536 MB
Driver Version: 8.15.0011.8585
Driver Date: 4/30/2009 10:02:00 PM
Driver Language: English


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Don't 8.xx version numbers indicate a Window 7 driver or was that DirectX 11? Or is nVidia simply breaking naming convention again?

Turn off DoF, that should help on outdoor maps.

That's the worst case. No performance gain to offset the additional overhead caused by sending texture and geometry data to multiple GPUs than just a single one. Again, if the game is waiting on the GPU to finish the frame it's working on before it can continue, then multiple GPUs will provide a benefit.

I'm clear in my guide that I'm not a big believer in Crossfire/SLi. It forces a system designer to design for more power, more cooling and while the big name games that end up as video card benchmarks tend to show multi-GPU boost in performance when all the knobs are cranked to 11 on $1000 30" monitors, most games can be tuned to play very well with the knobs at 8 or 9 on a $200-300 22-24" monitor with a single video card with minimum impact to quality.

Also my feelings on the matter are the result of some simply awful multi GPU setups I've seen advertised with fairly low end cards when a rig with a single card higher end card of equivalent price would eliminate some of the system complexity as well as provide consistently higher frame rates in all games. But newbie PC gamers see SLi or Crossfire and assume that's automatically better than any single card solution, end up being taken in by this hype and getting twin 9500GTs rather than a single 9800GT.

Well for me it's about cable management and not obstructing airflow and nothing to do with performance.

Plus the fact that PATA support is now considered a legacy feature. Intel's Southbridge chipsets stopped supporting PATA with the ICH8 in 2006. We are on the ICH10 right now. Motherboards built with Intel chipsets need to include a separate PATA interface chip simply to provide the single channel of IDE that most motherboards still offer.

Still waiting for the day of SATA/PCIe be the only internal MB connectors and USB, Firewire and Ethernet) only on the back panel for ports (no more PS/2 keyboard and mouse).

If a game, any game, needs to wait on the GPU to finish rendering the frame it's currently doing before it can send more data to the card, then having a 2nd GPU helps (assuming alternate frame rendering here). If the CPU does a little bit of work, send data to GPU, repeat until all the frame data is sent, then you won't see much improvement.

It's the ratio between these two extremes that affects the amount of performance increase you will see in a game with multiple GPUs. If a game is rarely waiting on the GPU to finish, you won't see much improvement in average performance but the minimum frame rate recorded will be higher. A game like Crysis, which has nothing but complex frames that take a lot of GPU time to render will naturally have the most improvement in Crossfire/SLi mode.

In the past someone did try SLi testing with their "normal" settings (which is everything except DoF and Bloom) at 1920x1200 as well as one with all the bells and whistles on (DoF and Bloom), using Zloth's demo player to test. At their "normal" settings they didn't see much of an increase except in the minimum frame rate. Average went up slightly. With everything turned on they did see an improvement in average framerate beyond the additional 2 or 3 fps but I don't remember offhand how much.