Messages

136

Computers - Technology / Re: wireless broadband routers

« on: June 28, 2008, 12:18:46 pm »

At £40 from a company I've never heard of it's not going to be great

300 Mb/s is utter marketing BS! If you're going to get draft n router and you want it to deliver, you need to get draft n cards, which are really expensive right now (£50 -70). But they will eventually come down in price.

I read a lot of reviews at CNET on wireless routers recently, if you want top end expect to have to pay £70 - 90

137

General Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 RC2 (out of beta!)

« on: June 12, 2008, 01:10:39 pm »

Yup, there was an RC3 I didn't bother posting because it only had changes for the Mac.

138

General Discussion / Gamers Discover Glitch, Send Death Threats To Developer

« on: June 10, 2008, 11:11:00 pm »

Game developer, Infinite Interactive has said the the developer of one the company’s games has been receiving death threats over a glitch in one its PSP games.

Eurogamer reports that a glitch in Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords made gamers so mad that the developer received several death threats and even a bomb threat.

Despite the fact that the company thinks two of the threats were ‘serious’, it seems relatively upbeat about the whole thing.

"One death threat in 25 years of game development. Puzzle Quest comes out and I had six death threats and one bomb threat."

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/game-developer-death-threat,news-28449.html (read the full article, it's hilarious).

139

Bugs & Feature Requests / Re: Lost my donated Convivea version...

« on: June 07, 2008, 12:40:29 am »

http://www.convivea.com/recover.php 

140

Computers - Technology / Re: New project no 2

« on: June 05, 2008, 08:01:31 pm »

Just happen to have Tomb Raider Anniversary.lol Full version, came with Mobo. More familiar with this game since daughter was always on the previous versions. No wonder she was trying to steal from me. . It says 16+ moderate violence, so I guess I can try. Finding better Graphics and speed when I lower multiplier from 9 to 8  and increaseFSB and Mem. Still having occasional shut downs due to display driver  nviddmkm but always recovers during benchmark testing. Still playing with various settings and no doubt I will find  the best one for the set up.. CPU figures are well above average, its the graphics I have to sort out.
TKS
cheers

Yeah, that's entirely expected, low multiplier and high FSB means you have more memory bandwidth, this would affect current generation Intel CPUs more than it would AMD or Intel's neg gen CPUs (Nehalem), because basically they both get rid of the FSB.

Speaking of which we have finally seen some early benchmarks on Nehalem: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3326

Unless AMD can keep up, looks like I might have to switch at some point, they've basically taken everything that gives AMD an advantage and added it to their architecture.

141

General Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 RC2 (out of beta!)

« on: June 04, 2008, 09:35:52 pm »

Updated to RC2, final release is till expected to be released before the end of the month.

142

Computers - Technology / Re: New project no 2

« on: June 03, 2008, 10:25:27 am »

sounds good. Yeah PC6400 (800Mhz) is not a bad deal but you could use 4 gigs man. 2 is just not cutting it these days.

Stole some ram from other PC. Now running 2x2GB. Mobo FSB at 1333 and memory at 990. Slightly upped  GPU on 8800GT SLI to 663/940.  Dont even have a chance to get my finger off the keys before process is complete. Graphics are excellent. Perhaps Quantum  can advise me before I start a game ,which came with Mobo. Ghost Recon advanced warfighter. Not sure if this game has any stress levels on my PC. CPU running at 3.0GHZ (The fans are running ,lol) Temps not a problem
cheers

Huh... games that come with components don't tend to stress those components on purpose so you think you've got good stuff.

The only good game I've ever seen come with anything is the Half-Life games with ATi cards, but ATi cards always performed spectacularly on Half-Life and Half-Life 2 series and they've never been stressful games anyway.

If you want pretty:

Crysis
Call of Duty 4 (How cinematic and how well voice acted this is is amazing)
Oblivion still stresses cards out on maximum settings, especially get texture mods and tweaks to improve the graphics a lot!
Unreal Tournament III is unlikely to stress your set-up on maximum settings but will look very pretty!

I highly suggest any of the Orange Box games for an enjoyable gaming experience. If you like the concept of puzzling solving in games, get Portal! It's about the best game of recent times, and it looks so pretty and so clean in maximum settings with 16 x AA, very very funny game as well.

One of the beauty of such a powerful system isn't always playing new games, but going back to 2 - 3 year old games and breathing new life in to them by playing them on super high settings with a fantastic frame rate. The game F.E.A.R plays like a cross between a traditional FPS and Japanese Horror movie, absolutely fantastic in high graphics if you're in to that sort of thing.


Edit: Oh and apparently the new Tomb Raider games (Legend and Anniversary) are supposed to be really good, with British voice actors and a lot of British sense of humour involved.

143

General Discussion / Re: RIP HD DVD

« on: May 28, 2008, 08:16:15 am »

I never looked into it because regions never affect me, but you should be able to get most blu-ray players in a PC to run any region. Even if windows only lets you change it once, there are hacks to get around that sort of thing.

I've seen quite a few movies use MPEG4 and I think the extra 10 gigs still makes it more future proof.

Having to hack something to make it work when it should just work is very anti-consumer, like I said.

I've not seen hardly any movies which use h.264 (MPEG4 Layer-10), most use VC-1. The extra 20 GBs is good, but as an overall package I still maintain HD DVD was better.

144

Computers - Technology / Re: New project no 2

« on: May 26, 2008, 12:45:50 am »

I'm glad you decided to go with the 64bit version. I think it's better to start moving toward 64bit these days and as Quantum said it can handle larger amounts of RAM much more efficiently. The 9 series geforces are a complete waste in my opinion.

The 9800 GTX doesn't even outperform the 8800GTX in some of the tests. Nvidia really screwed up their whole numbering system. The 9800 GX2 really should have been an 8900 GX2. Why they never had an 8900 I don't know. It's good to see you got an 8800GT though, that's a damn good card.

The 9000 series really started with the 8800GT, but they still wanted people to buy the left over bulk of their 8800 cards so they called it an 8800.

I really hate the phrase of "x doesn't even out perform y in specific test z". Certain Pentium 4's out perform Intel's latest Quad Core offerings in certain tests, this is the nature of modern chip design.

145

General Discussion / Re: RIP HD DVD

« on: May 26, 2008, 12:39:45 am »

I know this thread is a little old but Blu-ray's extra capacity was what I think really appealed to most people. I also like the idea of the required protective coating (whereas with HD-DVD it was optional), although blu-ray's data was closer to the edge and more susceptible to damage from scratches anyway.

The region free idea was what I really liked though. Blu-ray only has 3 regions but I'd rather it have one.

The extra size has yet to be used well on blu-ray, with many films still coming out in the horrific MPEG2 codec and you need about 100 GB to make that look as good as 20 GB of VC-1 or h.264.

The reason it was optional on HD-DVD is because unlike Blu-Ray it wasn't designed like an open sandwich, if the layer of coating wasn't applied to Blu-Ray the slightest scratch would screw the whole disk up, HD DVD was better designed in this area.

The region system really screws over Anime fans in the U.K, we could at least easily get Japanese discs before hand, but we can now get neither American nor Japanese. It's just hard work and very anti-consumer.

146

Computers - Technology / Re: PC Tools

« on: May 25, 2008, 02:59:19 am »

I don't tend to buy stuff. Because I run the computer on my own, I don't bother with an anti-virus and I use Spybot S&D just in case, but it's mainly to pick up tracking cookies and have a well rounded view on all the start-up applications.

147

General Discussion / Re: Cars or Cargo Ships on Global Warming

« on: May 24, 2008, 11:52:35 pm »

Aren't cars a bigger polluter over all?

Remember there were probably 1000s of other compact fluorescent lamps on that ship, so it does get divided out a lot and it produces a lot less carbon than traveling by air.

While I agree, it's nice to look at carbon footprint and all, the world is finally starting to come in to it's own on the global economic arena and at the same time America isn't liking it and becoming more isolationist in feeling, which can only hut it's economy in the long run. America has to accept that it can no longer be the biggest and best for everything, but that shouldn't stop it from being a big global economic player.

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General Discussion / Re: Price of Gasoline

« on: May 24, 2008, 11:46:43 pm »

lol, in the U.K it's the equivalent of being over $9 per Gallon and has been for some time.

149

General Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 RC1 (out of beta!)

« on: May 17, 2008, 10:48:38 pm »

Updated to RC1, Firefox 3 final release is still expected to be released in June.

150

Computers - Technology / Re: New project no 2

« on: May 14, 2008, 04:46:09 am »

I wouldn't get too fussed about 3DMark scores, computers and complicated machines that excel differently in all sorts of areas and really can't be reduced down to a single number. Those that get high scores on 3DMark like that probably don't have a better system at all, just very good at running 1 benchmark for 10 minutes.