Father Xmas

A lot of this reminds me of when I got a Visor (Palm clone) in the late 90s.

Didn't use it much for the calendar but I had games, books and goofy apps that I used to pass the time when I was eating alone in restaurants.

Got reasonably good with Graffiti to enter data but I still got the funky quad folding keyboard because, well it was a funky quad folding keyboard.

Now if they get what's his name from Zombieland to play Oscar then the circle is complete.

The first PotC film.

The first Back to the Future film.

The first Matrix film.

Detecting a pattern yet?

Put up a HiJackThis report. It may be a problem with something else that's running.

Scrapper lock, it's not a disease, it's a lifestyle.

That and they can't grow forests fast enough, ever seen the unabridged version?

$30, try $60+ for cable. At least right now the phone companies are slicing the price on DSL to under $20 a month for a year for new customers.

Okay then.

The i5-650 is a nice CPU. Blows away the previous Core 2 dual cores.

8GB is more than enough system memory.

The "eco" hard drive may hurt performance some.

The GT 320 is a cut down OEM variant of the GT 240. It only uses 45 watts and has about 60% of the shader power of a 9800GT. I'm surprised you got UM to work with any kind of reasonable frame rate.

The case is fanless, as far as I can tell. It relies on the PSU fan to suck the hot air out of the case and there is a duct that runs from the CPU fan to the side to suck in cool air. Make sure there is space on the left side of the case so the air flow isn't blocked.

The biggest obstacle in upgrading is the tiny 300 watt power supply. Replacing the GT 320 with anything would require an upgraded power supply, and a rear case fan (looks like either 80 or 92mm) for good measure.

Well enjoy.

Anyone can make an Optimus Prime that looks steampunk, but to make him transform into a steam locomotive, that takes talent.

The reasons I'm down on SSDs are:

1) Price. They are 20-30x more expensive per GB than a 7200 RPM hard drive.

2) Rapidly Evolving. There seems to be a new SSD controller every few months, each significantly better than the last. Add in a rapid release of new BIOSes for each of those SSD controllers.

3) Only Windows 7 currently optimized for SSDs. Not that much of a problem for newer systems.

I still think it's a great advancement in mass storage, just not as mature or at the point where economy of scale will drive the price down where I think improved application performance is worth the price.

Article today at Tom's Hardware showing the eVGA GTX 460 1GB Superclock delivering about 10% better performance than a stock speed GTX 460.

NBC Universal Cable model, as used on USA and SciFi.

And I prefer the Daily Mail for my weekly dose of Amy Pond while waiting for the next series.

Love it they still use the Parker simply appearing gag and Elliot's encyclopedic knowledge of thug origins gag.

Sophie's story was interesting and still plausible.

Hardison learns a new skill.

I actually enjoyed last weeks a lot as well.

It's on all the tech news sites including the European ones.

People have been expecting this since the merger.

On a positive note, there are rumors that the HD 6870 has closed the tessellation gap with the GTX 480.

They are likely veteran players who can get shoulder capes at level 1. Also I think one of the add-on packs, Mac I think, have a level 1 cape but don't quote me.

Yes, the complete collection is CoH/CoV and GR with GR's goodies and one month. GvE, Mac and Wedding goodies are still extra along with all the super boosters.

And remember you can't gift via the online store. Buy a copy and mail it to them.

Let's hop into the wayback machine.

Well in 1998 some clever bloke discovered that if they changed the FSB clock from 66MHz to 100MHz on an Intel BX motherboard, they could make the $200, 300MHz Celeron A run nearly as fast as the $750, 450MHz Pentium II. The only difference was the Pentium II had 512KB instead of 128KB of L2 cache, and cost $550 more.

Ever since DIYers have looked for a way to get high performance from inexpensive CPUs, sometimes to the point of insanity. Intel helps by pricing their fastest CPUs multiple times that of their cheapest in a particular CPU family. Take the i7-9xx quad cores for example. The 2.80GHz i7-930 is $290, the top end 3.33GHz i7-975 Extreme is $1040. So best case 20-25% better performance for 3.5x the cost? That's part of the motivation, the other is simple bragging rights.

It's become the de facto assumption that any review of a CPU, motherboard, memory or video card has to include overclock testing. Overclocking has also spawned entire industries and feature sets.

• The primary reason for 3rd party CPU (and video card) coolers is to dissipate the additional heat generated by extreme overclocking. This including liquid cooling, refrigerated liquid cooling and full immersion liquid cooling (remember, insanity!).
• One of the reasons the industry went from a 4-pin to 8-pin main CPU power connector is to provide more power safely to the motherboard due to extreme overclocking.
• Higher end motherboards use a more complex CPU voltage regulator with increased number of phases to handle the extra amperage while maintaining clean stable power. This also require more extreme cooling measures for the voltage regulator so you will find large heat sinks, some connected together by heat pipes (looks like a metal tube), all located around the CPU socket where the CPU voltage regulator circuitry is found.
• The faster the CPU, the faster the RAM you need to keep it well fed. Faster, low latency memory also tend to use more power so it generates more heat and therefore come with more complex heat sinks, some even with optional cooling fans or even liquid cooling connectors (remember, insanity). Actually the amount of additional heat is trivial compared to the CPU for maybe an extra 5% of performance.

Of course it's gotten to the point now that all the extra costs partially (or totally) offset the savings of buying the cheaper CPU in the first place.

Intel has tried to design in ways to prevent overclocking while motherboard manufacturers have been designing ways to overcome those limits. Now there are rumors that Intel's next gen of mainstream CPUs will be locked down hard, not even base clock tweaking will work so Intel can sell "unlocked" CPUs for a "modest" premium to the DIY market. We'll see who's cleverer in the coming months, Intel or Taiwan.

Yea it was a comment about Zen's. I dislike it when someone gets all excited about "must have" tech in game systems, whether that's SLi, RAID 0 disk arrays or nowadays, SSDs. SSDs murder conventional hard drives in drive benchmarks, even the latest 10K RPM WD VelociRaptor drives, but that improved performance doesn't reflect nearly as much in actual application benchmarks. That money is better spent on a better video card and/or CPU than an SSD.

As it is today, a standard 7200 RPM hard drive is under $0.10 a GB, the 10K RPM VelociRaptor is near $0.50 a GB but an SSD is over $2.15 a GB for "large" SSDs, closer to $3 per GB for smaller drives.

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A place to get an estimate about PSU size is the PSU Calculator. It is reasonably up to date with the current crop of CPUs and video cards. I always select "high end - desktop" for motherboard and set capacitor aging to 30%. 7200RPM SATA drives are "Regular SATA".

I then take the minimum PSU size it gives, divide by 8 (6 if you like a lot of spare capacity) and that's what I use for my minimum amps at 12 volts criteria. Also for me a PSU needs to be 80 plus rated (efficiency standard) and at least 80% of it's rated wattage needs to be available at 12 volts. Then of course it needs to have enough connectors of the types I'm looking for, reasonably long cable lengths, etc. LED fan, glow in the dark cables, glossy paint job, transparent or with a window isn't even a criteria.

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As for the two motherboards. The P55-GD85 has two SATA III and two USB 3.0 ports, the P55-GD65 doesn't. USB 3.0 is a great thing for the new generation of external drives, with USB 3.0 as this bumps their performance from 30-35MB/s of USB 2.0 to nearly the same speed as an internal SATA drive. SATA III doubles the transfer rate of SATA II (which doubled SATA I) but only high end SSD drives are bumping up against the SATA II limits and most hard drives are barely exceeding SATA I limits.

NewEgg has a misprint, the P55-GD65 doesn't have any USB 3.0 capability at all.

The P55-GD85 is missing the PCIe x4 slot, which isn't that important. It has a somewhat different card slot arrangement with the two old time PCI slots found between the video card slots, the P55-GD65 as them as the last two slots.

The P55-GD85 adds an internal reset button while both have an internal power and MSI's One Touch OC set of buttons. The P55-GD85 also has a reset CMOS button on the rear connectors. These are niceties for OCers.

Probably other "premium" tweaks for hardcore OCers on the P55-GD85.

Yes it dropped by another 53% in the box office but it's per theater numbers didn't drop as much, only 15%. Still it's under $2K per theater number will put it on the short list of movies to drop when something new comes along.

It may last longer in theaters near colleges as students come back and are looking to rebond with friends.

I wonder if the Cera hatred is merely an amplified internet meme that after enough repetition over the years people would simply assume it's true and trot it out as a reason whenever any of his films don't knock it out of the box office park.

I never quite understood the dislike for actors like Cera, Justin Long or Shia LeBeouf (other than the over saturation of Shia).

(I hate it when the browser crashes and takes a long post with it )
Great case, PSU is old and limited with only a combined 22 amps at 12 volts available. Current generation 450 watt PSUs, at least the high quality ones, are over 30 amps. The reason this is important is because both the CPU and video card draw their power from 12 volts.

If you are trying to keep the price down, dropping $200 on a small SSD isn't the best way to spend your money.

SATA III (aka 6Gb/s) not going to matter a lot short term and then only on SSDs. Conventional HDs barely exceed SATA I transfer rate limits.

Ideas

The MSI P55-GD85 is a nice motherboard at $230, the P55-GD65 is also nice but $70 less.

There is a factory OC GTX 460 1GB card from eVGA for $240.

The i5-760 is $210

4GB, 2x2GB DDR3-1333, Cas 7 for $100.

And as fugly I may think the XFX PSU Zen recommended looks, it does get great reviews from sites I respect that tear a PSU down, analyze it's parts and do proper load testing. Currently the XFX Black Edition 750 watt is $130.

So that's $910 with the GD85 motherboard, $840 with the GD65 motherboard.

Going from 4-8GB isn't going to matter all that much unless you are running a whole lot of stuff while gaming. You are already running a 64-bit OS so the system is already seeing all 4GB. Win 7 may improve performance overall a bit, it's an optimized version of Vista.

SSD isn't going to help that much. Yes they are faster but you are paying a very big premium ($2-3 per GB) for 30% faster load times.

The 9800GT isn't a bad card, but is on the low end for Ultra Mode.

The power supply is very weak. You are pushing it with the 9800GT as it is. If you think about upgrading the video card, you will most definitely need to upgrade the PSU.

Your CPU is relatively weak. An energy efficient, 1st gen, 1.8GHz Phenom quad with only a 2MB L3 cache isn't really a strong CPU. It could limit the added performance of a faster video card. I'm unsure though.

Music: Battle Without Honor or Humanity - most people would recognize it from sporting events or the Kill Bill trailer.

Movies: The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?