SevereCalamity

The real question is :

"Why is a brute with eviscerate and granite armor killing goldbrickers?"

I see nothing wrong with that picture.

Defense sets I think in general are a bit slow starting. I think it's just how it works. However, I've tried EA multiple times and have never managed to get one out of the level 30 range.

It's called Driver Sweeper and you can get it from guru3d.com. You still want to remove the driver via control panel as normal, then restart into safe mode to remove any left over driver files with driver sweeper. For Nvidia you would want to choose the Nvidia Graphics Drivers as well as the PhysX drivers since they are included now. After cleaning, reboot windows normally and install the new driver. That's how I've done it for a while now and I've never encountered any trouble.

If you don't have any trouble with your current drivers, theres no need to use this method until a new driver update.

I'm using the 190.62 drivers from Nvidia's site with my 275GTX, haven't had an issue yet. And yes, Driver Sweeper is still the best app for getting rid of those old drivers.

That is a very decent gaming machine you have there. The I7 920 is the cheapest of the I7 cores available and is a very, very strong CPU. Obviously RAM will not be an issue. The video card is top notch, and will have no problem playing CoH at max settings at a high resolution (1920x1200).

CO will be a bit more difficult to max out, if it's even possible at this point in time. On my old core 2 duo with an 8800GT at max settings I was somewhere between 20-30FPS all the time. With my new machine, which is pretty close to what you have with a slightly better video card (275GTX), I was seeing around 45-55. Granted this was open beta, I have not actually bought the game to test out the final product.

The things I don't like:

Vista. I have it and hate it, too much bullcrap and restrictions and it just irritates me. Also 64bit can be a bit tricky with drivers and some games, even overall performance issues if you don't know what you're doing.

A single 1TB hd. Sure, that thing is going to hold a lot. On a side note, I would never install my windows or games on such a large hard drive. When you have to reformat that sucker you're going to lose all the extra stuff besides windows too. You could create a 150ish GB partition at the front for that purpose, but I'm a fan of the "Put your pagefile on a separate physical partition" train of thought. If you're looking to spend 2k and you have 1200 right there, you might want to invest in a 10,000RPM 150gb raptor or even a 120gb SSD hard drive for your windows/applications. Create a small partition at the beginning of your 1TB hard drive and assign your pagefile to that. That will allow your windows to access both hard drives at the same time when windows wants to use the pagefile and your windows/game files at once. The last thing you want on this awesome machine is hard drive indunced lag.

The 220 is a modern low end card. The 1gb of memory isn't going to help you much when the gpu isn't very strong. It has about 1/5th of the power of the higher end cards. Also, what resoloution are you playing at?

CoH is a horribley unoptimized game graphically. It's way more CPU intensive than most games, and is still pretty taxing on the graphics card too. Even though you upgraded to a dual core cpu, if it's on the slower end it could also be holding you back. I remember when I was using my dual core cpu I would OC the sucker up from 2.13ghz to 3.6ghz and see a 10-15FPS increase with the same graphics card (8800GT at the time) at 1920x1200. I would wager that the same 2 year old 8800GT is more powerful than the card you currently have.

In your situation, I would definately say its your video card. Even if you did upgrade to a better one, your cpu could still hold you back (bottleneck) your over all gaming performance at higher resoloutions.

This makes me sad as I just built a new rig and I'm using my old 8800GTS as a dedicated physx card. Saaaaaad.

I dont think that motherboard in your example could support that E6600 (dual-core) processor you chose. Just nit picking.

Also, I can vouch for the new AMD heatsinks being much better than their old ones. Some of them even have the heatpipes which seem to be all the rave these days.

I already have a SS/ELA up high right now so won't be playing through ELA for a while. Your PvP section is pretty nice and gives great advice and this guide will be great for all new players. Good job.

They can make it a more reasonable requirement for sure, but I just hope they make a new reward for those of us who took a "shortcut" to go above and beyond what some people are willing to do. Regardless if it's a shortcut or not, it's still something I did and someone else didn't. If they do change the requirement to a lesser badge, then I hope they have some sort of compensation in mind. Otherwise spending all that time having to set up missions and trying to find enemies that won't kill me will be in vain, as the 100mil badge is pretty much useless by itself.

Resting in front of a +1 freak juicer punching you every 4 seconds nets you about 300,000 damage per hour at lvl 35-37. Resting in front of three gets you around 900,000, but you need someone healing besides just resting.

After spending the last 3 weeks AFK farming while I was sleeping and at work, I would be upset if they were to change this at this point. As I've mentioned in other posts, the 5% end and HP increase is trivial 99% of the time and shouldn't be the main reason to get this accolade. I wanted the Born in Battle text displayed beneath my brutes name because it fits his (and many other brutes, I'm sure) concept and background. However, in viewing the big picture, having the high pain threshold accolade and invade accolade will put you up to 20% more HP. For a brute, that is a pretty generous increase. But you will need the 5mil debt badge for that, and I try not to die most of the time and at 37 on the same brute I just got my first debt badge. Hmph...

Overall looking at the powers, it looks like its a nice miss-mash of other sets. Decent damage resistance, dark armor-ish status protection shield, super reflexes passive recharge reduction power, end drain/restore and a decent looking final power.

You guys are all crazy. There's no bugs in this game.