Messages

376

Music - Movies - TV / Re: The Best TV-series of the century

« on: August 27, 2007, 11:26:43 pm »

My favourite show (that started and fully finished a season in this century) is definitely:

HEROES!

So I've added it on to your poll.

377

Offbeat Relish / Re: Boy in court for throwing sausage

« on: August 27, 2007, 11:23:10 pm »

Wasn't this immediately thrown out of court?

378

Computers - Technology / Re: what is the better Graphic Card ??

« on: August 26, 2007, 08:41:29 pm »

thank you Quantum,

can you talk me about the CPU revolution from P4 to now ?! i think i wasn't in this world for 3 years! 

Well essentially P4 was crap, it consumed too much power, generated too much heat and increasing its clock speed didn't provide huge leaps in performance, so Intel scrapped the line all together. While P4 was out, AMD came out with the Athlon 64 and the Opteron line which just battered P4 and Xeon in the desktop and server markets, consuming less power, generating less heat and out performing them considerably. The Athlon 64 was a 64 bit CPU, it was backwards compatible with all 32 bit stuff and if you couple it with a 64 bit OS you can go over 4GB of RAM Which you can't with 32 bit stuff. Intel released a 64 bit CPU called Itanium, which essentially bombed, it wasn't backwards compatible and emulation of old code was VERY slow. Intel also tried releasing dual cores based on its netburst architecture (i.e Pentium 4), but they scaled poorly and were again left behind by the Athlons.

Fortunately for Intel they were working on a 2nd line of CPUs, the Pentium M line. Based on developing a fast CPU at low power and heat, it developed a lot better ideas than the Pentium 4, in fact its starting point wasn't Pentium 4, it was Pentium 3, it has developed in a completely different direction. The Pentium M architecture was developed and turned in to the Core architecture, still unable to compete with AMD in the desktop market, they devloped it again in to the Core 2 architecture (called Conroe). Finally Intel had a better performing CPU than AMD, and they were going to use it to stuff AMD as much as possible and try and gain the market back as much as possible. So for the last year we've been caught in a price was between Intel and AMD.

AMD, after 1 year, are about to finally respond and release their own new architecture (Barcelona), it does a lot of the things the Core2 line did to become so fast, but as of yet now real official benchmarks or well done independent benchmarks have come out. This will be released to their server market and later in the year a similar CPU architecture (Agena) will be released to the desktop market. Intel will be releasing their new die refresh, (they're going from 65 nanometres to 45 nanometres), while there are some architecture improvements, it looks like without SSE4 optimization (a new instruction set they are introducing), it will only average about 5% faster than their current CPUs.

379

Computers - Technology / Re: what is the better Graphic Card ??

« on: August 26, 2007, 09:44:30 am »

wow great!

thank you friends, i think i will buy a new computer! with the new technologies!!

what about CPU ? Memory cards DDR2 ?!!  i need to learn and use it for 3D Graphics programs rander!

CPUs:

The two big competitors are Intel and AMD now, both are running on DDR2 mainly, but Intel can also run on DDR3 with a new special motherboard. However DDR2 is VERY CHEAP to buy at the moment.

Intel are currently using socket LGA775. They've been on LGA775 for some time now and you need to be careful if you expect it to work with their new CPUs coming out at the start of next year (Penryn), you'll probabily needed the latest chipsets on your motherboard as sometimes upgrading on the same socket can be a little odd with Intel.

AMD are currently using socket AM2, they plan to upgrade to AM2+ by the end of the year. Both will run exclusively on DDR2. These sockets are intercompatible (though older motherboards might need a BIOS update), however if you buy an AM2+ CPU at the end of the year with an AM2+ Socket, you will receive a few extra benefits in power consumption and minor speed improvements.

As it stands Intel dominate the high end market (fast dual cores and quad cores). AMD stand on their own 2 feet and are very competitive in the budget arena ($200 and less). The mid-range is a little bit more difficult, but probabily Intel have the advantage. This may change when AMD bring their new CPUs out at the end of the year, as early benchmarks of Penryn put it only about 5% faster clock for clock.

I mainly use www.anandtech.com for my tech news and reviews.

380

General Discussion / Re: Firefox 2 Beta 2

« on: August 26, 2007, 09:35:18 am »

I don't even want to try firefox!

That was constructive, why not?

381

Music - Movies - TV / Re: [MOVIE] SUNSHINE

« on: August 22, 2007, 07:07:57 pm »

A bunch of my friends know the guy who advised them on the science of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_%28physicist%29

Apparently he's a bit of a jerk and just goes around getting all the attention of the media.

382

Gaming / Re: Resident Evil 5 is COMING ON PS3 / XBOX 360 !!

« on: August 22, 2007, 07:03:07 pm »

still dont own either ps3 or xb360, but ill probably need to pick one up in the next year. most likely will be xb360 for Halo 3, lol..

side note about Resident Evil, anyone watch the movie? from like, 2002?  i never saw it, haha... but i used to play the Resident Evil games on PS1. and since its coming out on both systems, ill probably still end up with an xb360.

Well over here in the U.K the 360 is doing phenomenally well compared to the Xbox (which kind of tanked). But that's because they're getting a hell of a lot of good games on it and it's well positioned in terms of price, unlike the PS3 which is £425 ($850!!).

You should play Resident Evil 4 at some point, it's probabily the best in the series. They changed the style of play a lot, but it still feels very Resident Evil, they seem to just be taking what they did in 4 and extending it further to make 5.

383

Computers - Technology / Re: what is the better Graphic Card ??

« on: August 22, 2007, 06:59:05 pm »

First you need to look at what your computer can take, almost all new graphics cards require a PCI-E x16 slot in your motherboard, if it's a bit older than 2 years it probabily has the older AGP slot which severly limits what you can buy.

Secondly you need to choose a price range, it really starts from 'ultra budget' at £30 - £60 ($50 - $100) to ultra high end at about £400 ($750). The best price / performance ratio where you can get some really kick ass games at the moment is probabily in the £170 - £210 range ($300 - $400). So yeah, you really need to choose how much you want to spend beforehand given the very wide range that is available to you these days.

384

P2P - Filesharing / Re: Illustrator CS3 Serial Number

« on: August 21, 2007, 10:56:58 am »

Do people seriously think this is a good sort of place to ask for this sort of thing?

Not here, not this forum, sorry.

385

Gaming / Re: Resident Evil 5 is COMING ON PS3 !!

« on: August 21, 2007, 12:05:11 am »

I'm a little tempted to change your title, as it's coming on the XBOX 360 as well.

Get lovely HD trailers here: http://www.gametrailers.com/game/2036.html

386

Computers - Technology / Re: Tell us about your PC.

« on: August 18, 2007, 10:16:03 am »

i have an intel pen 4cpu
3.2 gh
2 gb  ram
ati radeon 1900x graphics card
samsung 21 in monitor
120 gig hard drive
plan to upgrade to an intel core 2 duo 6700
or quad processer
i want something faster than instant coffee.
i like graphics and want speed for rendering.
could use some advice on best way to go for speed rendering in 3d applications.

...well you could either build an entire 3D rendering engine in a GPGPU language and run it off a graphics card at super speeds, or upgrade to a high end core 2 quad core. The best in graphs at the moment is the 8800GTX. All that said, new CPUs and GPUs likely to come out by the end of the year from AMD, Intel and nVidia, so the whole marke will have changed by then.

Anyway, just put a computer together for my mums boyfriend.

AMD Athlon 4000+ X2, OC @ 2.4 GHz
2 GB DDRII 800Mhz (4-4-4-12) RAM
ATi HD 2600 XT (still working on over clocking it)
Gigabyte Mobo, nForce 570 Chipset

It runs fast and smooth, but I am struggling with driver for the 2600, the ATi Catalyst won't load probabily, anyway, going through their support issues, bit by bit.

387

General Discussion / Re: Laptop of the future ??

« on: August 15, 2007, 01:08:19 pm »

Hard Drive sizes have been churning along pretty nicely, it would be nice to actually see a serious performance boost from them. It would literally take hours and hours to fill up a 1 terabyte hard drive at maximum speed, not to mention the amount of time it takes large quantities of data in to the RAM and give that seems to be increasing now at a fast rate, programs may just get longer and longer loading times.

388

Computers - Technology / Re: Multi-Touch Input Computers - Pretty Awesome!

« on: August 15, 2007, 01:01:05 pm »

I've seen a few different multi-touch computing, this is of course Microsoft's 'surface'. I've seen one displayed on a wall, which looked very cool as well. The wall one looks better for not have grubby fingers all over it, which I feel is going to be the main barrier for some time yet 

389

Computers - Technology / Re: firefox

« on: August 15, 2007, 12:58:35 pm »

seperate topic about firefox, but i thought i would just ask it in this thread anyway..

what's the best version of firefox to use right now? the last versions i was using had huge memory leaks that would suck up all my ram if i left it running for a while.

is there any good and/or best build right now? 

The best is really the latest, 2.0.0.6. Firefox continuously makes little minor improvements and updates.

Its first memory issue is really its caching, it determines if you have a large RAM, it'll allocate a lot of space to cache backwards and forwards pages, so it can natrually go up to 300+MBs of RAM without even memory leaking. Whether this is an issue or not is really a debate, but it is a user controllable value if you know where to change it.

Memory leaks were a big issue in version 1.5, not seen it as much of an issue with 2.0, but 3.0 is supposed to be even better when it comes out.

The other major problem is extensions, extensions don't go through nearly the same QA that Firefox does, so there's a lot of badly written extensions out there. Plus weird bugs if you have a certain combination of extensions installed and they conflict with each other. Fortunately if you have popular extensions, given the open nature of Firefox a lot of the major bugs are reported by the community.

390

General Discussion / Re: Firefox 2 Beta 2

« on: August 13, 2007, 10:09:14 pm »

any idea... when the official firefox 3 release will be..around oct or nov? hows the development coming onnit?

Well, orriginal it was due for Spring for 2007. But as it was, Firefox 2 development was pushed very fast for its deadline, this meant a lot of big things were just left for Firefox 3. I think in the development community there was a little disgruntlement about this and essentially they're just waiting till Firefox 3 is completely finished, which I think is a good thing. As it stands Firefox is in Alpha 7 at the moment:

http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2007/08/03/gran-paradiso-alpha-7-available-for-download/

The next edition should be Beta 1.