Father Xmas

Yea, you are going to need 64-bit Win 7 to use more memory. More memory may help but probably not as much as you would think.

Brand and model number on your power supply would help.

The 9800GT is listed as a 105 watt card. Using that as a guide power wise, a GTX 550Ti uses about the same amount of power but should be around 70% faster.

Not a lot you can do with your CPU. It's likely that your motherboard doesn't have any recent BIOS upgrades so it could recognize any of the current Socket 775 Core 2s that are still available.

Looks like I got my points as well. Time to check out my wish list.

And I agree with you 100% Hyper. At the very least the performance advantage in gaming that the Athlon 64 had over the Pentium 4 saved the world from a few more years of CPUs designed around the horrible Pentium 4 design.

Then again you could also say that AMD's success with the original Athlon caused Intel to disregard actual performance and concentrate on improving clock speed (the Athlon could be overclocked beyond 1GHz where the Pentium III had significant troubles and since both processors has similar performance at the same clock, the key marketing point was who had the faster clock speed).

While it's true that when two threads are running on one of Intel's Sandy Bridge Cores that each is running at 55-60% the performance it would have if it ran alone, AMD missed the part about if it ran ALONE! There is no way in the Bulldozer module to use the resources of the second thread core if it's running a single thread. They were paying attention to the forest (all 8 threads cores running) but ignored the tree (a single thread running). Great for servers, great for massively threaded applications, not so great for everything else.

The next is a general issue with AMD cores, their memory cache performance pales in comparison to Intel's (AMD's L3 cache is less than half as fast as Intel's). This is important because a CPU waiting for an instruction is a CPU that is idling. Doing nothing. Twiddling it's little doped silicon thumbs. Doesn't matter how fast the CPU is clocked if it's waiting on memory. It's just doing nothing for more clocks.

As an aside, something that Intel's Sandy Bridge CPU has going for it is the PCIe controller to the video card is now coupled tighter to the CPU compared toe Socket 1156 and 1366 CPUs. AMD still needs to transmit graphics data off CPU to an external PCIe controller and then to the video card. This may be one of the reasons Sandy Bridge is so good with games.

There are some applications that the Bulldozer is very competitive with the i5-2500K and i5-2600K. Other applications it barely beats the slower Phenom II X6 1100 and falls behind the i5-2400. Unlike the Phenom II the Bulldozer also includes Intel's new AES encryption instructions and their new AVX math instructions found in the Sandy Bridge i5/i7 CPUs. However for games, it performs about the same as less expensive four or six core Phenom II.

Well the assumption with the whole teens go swimming is that three of them have been around long enough to avoid the classic mistakes with Skye being the most experienced. Not their fault that their fuel got siphoned (okay power pack taken). Random encounter in a very sparsely populated area. I think they were something like 80km away from the colony.

I think the premier were episodes 1 and 2 with "The Birds" episode being 3. While there seems to be a secondary story arc with the Sixers, the true purpose, the carvings, I don't think we are far enough along to matter. Not everything is as tightly coupled as Firefly.

I never considered Doom to be bad in the classic sense. He sees that the world could be made into a better place for all if only someone would step up and force everyone to work for the common good. The disagreement comes from the "force" part of the previous statement. The whole "ends justifies the means" argument.

The thing about trailers, quotes and reactions can be taken from very different parts of a movie and combined into a single scene that doesn't exist in the actual movie.

I'm betting the Loki perp-walk is like his appearance at the end of Thor. He's not really there but is controlling that person, possibly to get his hands on the cube.

The other classic trope would be that the giant fungus brain realized it was taking the boy with it and choose to break the connection itself. Very King Kong ending.

Well I think the boy will be back, used as a stabilizing force for Walter until Peter comes back. If not actually in the episode it will be mentioned by the other characters.

Yes but I usually shout "Fore!" before launching them. It makes more sense when you are wielding something.

Problem is the body disappears before you can get there. What, nobody Nemesis Staffs Level 1s with their Level 50?

Not a lot of Mac users on the Tech forum. I'm not sure how you start the game on the Mac but on the PC side if a patch is normally applied using the NCSoft Launcher.

I'm sure another Mac player who checks in here should be along within the day to answer your question. I'm assuming you are a Free or Premium player so you can't post on the Mac board in this forum.

I keep hitting the Captcha refresh button until I see something I can actually figure out.

That was the wrong patch notes for this patch. Strange that they got rid of the discussion thread but not the announcement.

This is the correct patch note for Tuesday.

But Loki with the McGuffin/Cosmic Cube could still be the real villain.

Except only the bodies exploded. But still once they saw the tendrils take out the lights earlier you would think, unless the passage to the core couldn't fit a person in a hazard suit.

They aren't boring, just less cheesy and set more in reality.

Christmas double feature.

Diehard and Lethal Weapon.

Doesn't count until there's an AI behind the CGI. Another decade or two away until we get Sharon Apple and another decade before she's able to move on her own (not just an avatar robot body).

The Bulldozer was exactly what I expected to be if you look at the thought process behind AMD.

The Intel i7-2600K is an unlocked four core processor with each core capable of executing two threads simultaneously and can have it's clock speed dynamically changed upward as thermal/power limits allowed. The Windows task manager will show 8 "cores" on this 4 core CPU.

AMD looked at the whole package and said how can we one up Intel. We already have a turbo feature on our six core Phenoms and Fusion CPUs. We already ship unlocked CPUs. Now what if instead of adding a little logic two each core to better utilize the super scalar nature of modern CPUs (multiple pipelines can execute several instructions simultaneously) the way Intel has done with their Hyper Threading, we go one step farther and duplicate the integer portion of the CPU so there are two integer cores per Bulldozer "module". The "module" will still share the same L1 instruction cache and L2 unified cache, the instruction fetch/decoder circuitry and the floating point unit. Windows task manger will also see 8 "cores" on this 4 "module" CPU.

The problem comes from the fact they choose to go with two less advance/complex integer core design than what they had with the Phenom II to save space. It's true that with Intel's design the performance enhancement you get with HT is variable, including worse performance than running the two threads one after the other rather than co-mingling them. This is due to sharing the L1 and L2 caches between two threads running at the same time. But conversely as you add active threads, Intel's design will first use all available cores before doubling up threads in a single core. The Bulldozer is designed to double up threads first allowing the CPU shut down unused cores to save power/reduce heat so the turbo mode can max out.

With the price they set for the FX-8150, basically between the i5-2500 that doesn't have HT and the i7-2600K that does, if you look at the Cinebench 11.5 multi-threaded results fall right in between. However single thread results show that the older Phenom II cores, even the ones that don't turbo, are faster than the Bulldozer which does turbo. We are talking in the realm of 30-40% slower per clock than the Phenom II design. Ouch.

It's like the old joke that you lose a little money on each sale but you'll make it up in volume.

One tack that AMD marketing-drones are spouting off to the gamers is that the money you save by going Bulldozer over an i7-2600K you can spend on getting a better video card. It does make some sense. Most big name titles are GPU limited so a faster GPU will help with your overall performance but God help you if you play a game that's CPU limited.

So between the higher clock speed, more integer cores and better turbo modes, the FX-8150 can outperform the slower six core Phenom II by about 10-20% on heavily threaded applications. So outside of gaming this is the fastest AMD CPU. But not by much. And for gaming they are hoping you look at the total system cost of CPU + video card than compare CPUs with the same video card.

The Bulldozer design may be a real good idea for servers, just not the best design for a desktop.

Personally I hate speed runs. To me it's like skipping to the end of a mystery to see who did it. I hated what Katie Hannon TF turned into once IOs were introduced.

While I can understand for someone who have done a particular TF or Trial for the nth time that it's old hat and you want to skip all the boring stuff, people who haven't done it before or enough times to be bored with it, may actually want to take in the sights along the way.

So when forming a TF or Trial, please make it clear up front what the plan is.

Remembering Yawara! and pondering about it, there may be other sport series centered around a young female or group of female protagonists that, like Yawara!, is classified as a seinen series.

That's Tony being Tony. Big Ego and smartest man in the room trying to size up a bunch of individuals he just met. Also since this is Ironman's third film, ignoring the cameo in The Incredible Hulk, he is the best known hero of team to the general movie going public.

Thor and Captain America are probably the next two most recognized since IH was several years ago and the public has short memories and the apparent villain is from Thor with the apparent McGuffin from Captain America.

Speaking of Sarah I noticed she's on the cover of Maxim this month.