je_saist

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As of this posting there are no known plans to enable Faction Exclusive Archtypes to start as a Praetorian.

Nor are there any known plans to enable Faction Exclusive Archtypes to start as an Opposite faction. E.G. The Kheldian Archtypes will not be able to start as Villains :: The Arachnos Archtypes will not be able to start as Heroes.

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As of this posting it is known if leaving Praetoria, choosing one faction, and then using the Morality System to swap factions, will result in the unlocking of Epic Archtypes from both Factions. E.G. : if you leave Praetoria and Choose Villain to unlock the Arachnos, and then convert to Hero to unlock the Kheldians.

Theoretically it should... I just don't know of anybody that's tried.

maybe. But I'm supposed to be the expert on CoH and Cedega, and come on, I practically invite players to ask me questions over it.

right now Multi-GPU does nothing for City of Heroes from either ATi or Nvidia.

You can force AFR on Nvidia cards by modifying driver values in tools like nHancer, but doing so caries the normal risk of "muck about with the driver or the hardware and don't be surprised if things go completely wrong"

The good news is, you can have the most powerful laptop GPU currently available on the market in this price range.

That would be the RadeonHD 5870 Mobility, and Newegg has one from MSI for $1600.

Granted, that is an MSI model.

You can find an Asus model with the RadeonHD 5870 from Mwave for the $1600 pricepoint.

JR also has the Asus model for around the same pricepoint.

Dell will sell you a laptop with a RadeonHD 5870 mobility edition, but you'll be starting at $1800 for the Alienware brand name.

If it was my money on the line, I'd buy the Asus. It's got a slightly slower processor than the MSI, but it's got a larger screen, and Asus products tend to be built to last.

*crashes the skateboard into the side of the hot-tub and catapults into Fey's Lap!*

*suddenly has a brilliant idea!*

I just pull out the Playstation 3 controller like this...

select the pop-it like this...

and... poof!

*turns the cookie fort into a tofu fort!*

Mewhew!

*hops on a skateboard and rolls off down an out of place hill!*

Honestly? The fan.

The one I originally linked to, the 100283-3L uses a fan mounted on top of the GPU.

The second one, the 100283L, has the fan at the rear of the card and the card is fully ducted.

Ducted fans cost a few bucks more than non-ducted fans. Are they worth it? Well, depends on whether or not you are intending to overclock the system or not.

Anyways, Sapphire is basically the closest you can get to an AMD First Party card. They do pretty much all of AMD's prototype boards, and typically handle the stuff that is manufactured as an AMD part. Case in point, when AMD lost the HDMI class-action lawsuit over the x1x00 series cards, it was Sapphire that was tapped to send out replacement graphics cards.

Arcanaville hit on one of the key points:

Not everybody is running soft-capped Super Reflexes. Not everybody in the game is using IO buffs.

Not if you are using SO's, which from the amount of information we can get out of the developers every now and then, is basically the majority of the game. One of the key design problems is that the developers cannot balance the entire game or a single power-set against a semi-common IO buff build. If you actually ARE interested in the design theory Posi's got a wonderful post on the subject: http://www.mmodesigner.com/?p=63

The basic concept boils down to being able to predict what the minimum amount of protection any single player will have in any single situation. The ED caps give the developers some hard-figures on what to base each players potential capabilities at any given level.

Yes, there are some power-sets that just don't make sense against SO's. The pre-I18 Fiery Aura defense set and Martial Arts melee sets for example. The current Dark-Armor set for another example.

For the vast number of players with only SO's in their builds, Elude is still a valuable part of their defensive sets. From the perspective of SO's, Elude is not long in the tooth, and no it does not need to be rebalanced.

For reference, outside of Diamond Multimdia, nobody makes a bad ATi card. Gigabyte is a decent manufacturer, but it's not why I wouldn't buy that particular model. Tango Down is MSRP'd at $40 through ATi right now. The Gigabyte Card offers an instant $10 off and a $20 mail-in-rebate. So you'll pay about $150+ shipping for the Gigabyte HD 5770.

This Sapphire 5770 Model comes with an instant $30 off the $180 price point, a $15 Mail-In Rebate, AND the Tango Down game. So, you could have the exact same GPU, for $135+shipping.

depends on how many Defense IO's you can afford to buy.

UPDATE YOUR GRAPHICS DRIVERS!!!

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Now, if you are buying for the future, I have problems recommending the 5830 right now. It's a binned market filling part. I'm not saying I know what AMD's product roadmap looks like, but the 5770 is going to put less of a dent on your wallet now, and you probably won't be thinking man, if I had just waited a couple of weeks before buying.

The 5770 isn't a bad card either. With the right processor, it will do 1920*1200 in pretty much every-game either on the market or known to be hitting the market over the next year.

Thing is, a good 5770, if you shop carefully in the US, will be around $130 like this Sapphire that I'm linking too.

A good GTX 460, if you shop carefully in the US, will be around $100 MORE at $230, such as this EVGA model, or this Asus Model.

A 5830 is about $70 more than a 5770, such as this Sapphire model at $200, or this $190 Asus if you use the mail in rebate.

Basically, I'm not convinced that long term, you are going to be better off getting something more powerful than a 5770. You'll save around $60~$70 straight out between the 5770 and 5830, money that you could turn around later for a better processor or a second 5770.

That would be me mistyping a 2 instead of 4. Fixed.

When you are ready to buy for the rest of the system, just ask.

Depending on your resolution, this may be your best bang-for-buck. A 5770 should be able to drive these games with most options turned on in 1680*1050, even against a Core2.

Yes, Yes, and No.

First, the no. Right now multi-gpu rigs do nothing for City of Heroes. There's no guarantee that Crossfire or SLI will ever be supported under the City of Heroes game

Second, the first yes. ATi's crossfire is not as... restrictive as Nvidia SLI. With Nvidia SLI will only run when you have two cards from the same vendor. With ATi crossfire? Well... AMD typically just bases Crossfire support on model:



As long as you have the right model of chip, even if it's the not the exact same model, ATi Crossfire will still largely give a performance boost in supported games.

So, second yes, if you get a Crossfire compatible motherboard, you can just drop in a 57xx series card sometime in the future.

Also, don't worry about the motherboard being optimized for multi-gpu performance. HardOCP recently ran a 2x SLI Geforce GTX 480 setup against an x4/x4 motherboard (equivelent to a PCIE-gen-1 x8/x8) setup... and even in the Triple-Screen 3D Vision Surround resolutions the x4/x4 PCIE bus pretty much did nothing to the frame rates: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/...x16x16_vs_x4x4

So if you pick up a motherboard with a 16x/8x PCIE Gen 2, or even 8x/8x PCIE Gen 2 configuration, you will not experience a performance difference in single monitor resolutions.

For this you'll just have to yank open the side of the case and look.

From a pure power draw, if you can run a 9600 GT, the 5770 should also run.

a Fix like that wouldn't go into the patch notes.

Developers policy is not to list exploit fixes in the notes.