Father Xmas

While you have a lot of system memory but the graphics are a bit weak. I've found both Depth of Field and Bloom can significantly impact frame rate. Also having UM reflections turned on, even a little, is also a potential problem for a weak card.

Ultra mode is really a meant for much more beefier video cards. Most of those effects are computationally heavy and the 80 streaming processors on your HD 4350/4550 isn't going to cut it when it comes to the heavy lifting.

DVRs are the replacement for VCRs. My VCR has a one minute FF button on it's remote that can stack 3 times. This is an old argument about avoiding commercials.

The one major ability that DVRs don't have versus VCRs is the ability to archive material off of the device. When I first got a VCR in the 80s I went nuts and taped 100s of movies off of HBO and Cinemax. I taped the entire Robotech series. I have tapes of my favorite sporting events, things like close playoff games. With the lack of off loading saved programs as well as adding additional storage, you simply can't do that with DVRs.

The big difference between DVRs and VCRs for the average user, the ability to easily set it to record a program. I never had the problem myself, checking the TV guide and programming a VCR to record what I want but DVRs now makes it trivial enough that my technophobic Mom can fill the DVR with judge shows.

Well Alphas was originally a pilot for NBC and sat around for a few years. Three Inches was filmed last year and was targeted for SyFy. Both have relatively low SFX budgets which is important for a TV show on a small cable network like SyFy.

Of course I love Gary from Alphas, great character. However I did like Watts as the grumpy/hard edge/hot empath. The scene with her drinking in the bar looking miserable while the two blue color guys are sobbing uncontrollably to the sad country western tune playing was a hilarious example of her powers.

The thing about Three Inches was that the "supers" weren't as damaged psychologically or socially as a side effect of their abilities like in Alphas. Also it had a lot more humor than Alphas so it's more inline with Eureka and Warehouse 13.

Well his role was limited to recruiter/leader. He claims to have no powers himself but he does wield the power of PSYCHOLOGY quite well.

It was odd to see him cast as a man with a grown son. I can't imagine him as "old".

Edit: Crap, just looked him up on IMDB, he's my age.

Melee sets yes. Blasters yes. Low level support characters not often, they just aren't capable until higher levels with better enhancements.

So far I've bought Street Justice and Beam Weapon. Also bought the Titan Weapon pack for 0.

I bought the Halloween and Barbarian costume bundles.

I bought the Winter Holiday and New Years packs.

I bought the Snow Beast Pet.

I bought the cape and aura unlock.

I think I have 60pts left until near the end of next month. All of the above purchased only using my points stipend.

No problem. You just happened upon a topic where there was a lot of "spirited debate" once the details on what GR meant for a premium player and that it didn't mean incarnate.

It's still a touchy subject like chat and SG restrictions on free players.

Anyone else read Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio? Interesting take on speciation.

Oh look at me. I'm a teen girl with a smoking hot body and just came out of the shower and is now wearing a baby doll nighty.

Oh I hear a noise in the basement.

click - click - click

Oh the basement light seems burned out.

I'll go down anyway to take a quick peek.

Yea, people do dumb things in monster/horror movies ALL THE TIME. It's expected.

Actually it wasn't all that bad. Had a bit of a Wanted (sexy teammate) mixed with Mystery Men (odd powers) mixed with Kick-*** (main character is a slacker who wants to be more) vibe.

Other members of the team include a voice mimic; an insect controller; a precog with a two minute limit but using the power causes pain proportional to the distance into the future; a teen who could emit foul odors; and a woman who can manipulate the emotions of those near her.

Durakken, it's obvious he could turn things as well since he turned on a hose and started a number of cars. Also we didn't need to see the battery of tests they would put him through or did you want to have a montage sequence? He "joined" them only days before the mission. I'm sure that if the series happened that we would see him being tested more extensively but for this mission they only needed him to manipulate locks.

It is a teen, sorry young adult series. I would imagine a large number of it's teen fans are still under 17 and probably wouldn't want to go see it with their parents chaperoning if it was an R. With PG-13 it's drop them off and come back in three hours, unless the theater is also at a mall (we'll call when we are ready to leave, bring the minivan we all went shopping with our gift cards we got).

Forgot that everyone didn't know that the CPU portion of the A8 is a tweaked Athlon II quad core.

Well off the bat they could "fix" the L1 Instruction cache in each module so it's not a 1-way set associated per core. Then get someone to look at the L3 cache because it has worse latency than the Phenom II and twice the latency of Intel's Sandy Bridge. The problem with going with a deep pipeline, as Intel learned with the Pentium 4, is that general performance is affected greatly by the performance of the memory subsystem.

But that's me armchair quarterbacking.

Before SyFy greenlighted Alphas they had a choice between it and another super powered pilot called Three Inches staring Spike/Braniac James Marsters as the team's leader/recruiter. Well it looks as if SyFy finally decided to run the pilot and see if it garners any interest.

The premise involves a team of people with unusual but seemingly underwhelming super powers. The title refers to the new guy who can telekinetically move any object only three inches.

"... When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth."

I love Penny Arcade.

If I want to be anti-social or I don't agree with the grind for XP mentality of 95% of those who insist that a team needs to be maxed out to be worth it, that story arcs are a pain, that the only tactic is to bum rush mob after mob and believe you need a specific makeup of a team; too bad I'm soloing tonight.

I tend to make a new character at a drop of a hat. Made one tonight to play with Street Justice (Brute SJ/WP).

That said, too many of them are idling around level 14-20.

I hate laptops. I hate Intel laptops that use Intel integrated graphics. Sadly the Dell Inspiron 1318 is one of those.

Problem with CPU design is it's a several year process where you don't know if your design decisions were right until the first silicon is produced. If you guess wrong with the designs, you may be stuck with it for years (see Pentium 4).

That said the original Phenom hardware pretty much stunk when it came out, even ignoring the L3 cache problem. However the Phenom II ended up as a pretty good CPU. Perhaps the next version of the Bulldozer will fix some of the design problems and it will end up being decent part.

AMD is already selling the Athlon II X4 631 and 651 which are a GPU disabled (or broken) versions of their A8-xxxx Socket F1 parts.

Well The Hunger Games is an interesting teen series since it has nothing supernatural associated with it (no vampires, witches, fae, werewolves, ghosts, etc). The main character is a 16 year old girl who, unlike the heroine from Twilight, is a strong, smart, woman who in the first novel is a participant in a televised fight to the death versus 23 other teens, one boy and one girl, 14-18, from each district of a post apocalyptic North America. So it's sort of the anti-Twilight.

I think I still have one somewhere. No idea if it still works or not or what games I still have for it.

Your game settings are too high for your video card.

Turn down AA to 4x. Turn off Ambient Occlusion. You may also want to try a lower resolution such as 1600x900.

AMD Phenom II X4 970 ($140) Vs Intel i3-2100 ($125)

Dragon Age - Intel 9.8% faster
Dawn of War II - Intel 15% faster
WoW - Intel 19.1% faster
Starcraft II - Intel 10.5% faster

And that's between your AMD 3.5GHz quad core Vs an Intel 3.1GHz dual core with hyper threading.

While AMD had a great run against Intel during the Pentium 4/D era in gaming, once the Core 2 hit the scene AMD has been playing catch up. Now AMD has been competing with Intel by trying to price according to performance in thread heavy applications, usually by requiring more cores to do so.

And is a lot of cases, cranking the graphics settings up in games can saturate a single GPU video card so the differences in general CPU performance vanish but it still makes an impact when a gamer chooses to go with multiple GPUs.

I'm not a fanboy of one CPU or GPU company over the other. I once used AMD CPUs in my low end rig parts list until Intel finally came out with Sandy Bridge based CPUs in the sub $100 price range. Heck even the Pentium G840 I currently recommend is faster than the AMD X4 970 in those games and it lists for only $85.

And the primary reason I'm recommending nVidia over AMD now (I was recommending AMD GPUs until recently) is the whole graphics driver roulette problem with this game. When AMD can come out with three consecutive WHQL drivers that work with CoH, I'll start recommending them again but until then I'll rather sacrifice a bit of performance at the same price range with nVidia than being forced to choose between a driver that works with CoH and one that works with whatever latest game that the current driver is tweaked for.