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Originally posted by dfan

So when we reduce the psu's efficiency from total system consumption
500*0,8 = 400 watts
And this is with heavily overclocked system, you can state good quality 600 watt psu is surely enough. 
 

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Hmm you only have to reduce for the PSU's efficiency if the measurement is coming off a wall meter but given the similarity to xbitlabs' review of an i7 920 system with a GTX295 which is definitely measured from the PSU rather than from the wall I'd guess that graph is direct PSU measurement as well. So that 500W measurement would be a 625W measurement if it was done at the wall.

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Originally posted by dfan
A 600 watt psu will do, you don't need a nuclear power plant for normal computer. 
 
I wouldn't change x58 stuff away, it's with multiple gfx cards where triple channel memory is most effective.

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Wow, I actually though the 5890 had a much higher power consumption than it does. 190W for the 5890. That would have an absolute maximum power draw of 500W in an i7 920 system, so a 750W PSU would cover it easy. If he wanted to put another 5870 or 5890 into Crossfire he'd probably want a 800W-950W PSU though.

A 600W would work too but with degradation it might not quite cut it in a couple years, I like to recommend a little bit higher just to be safe so noone goes, man that guy gave horrible advice and I got screwed :P But yea 1000W are almost always uncalled for.

Wow that's a hell of a rig. Only thing that could make it better is an SSD on top of your 1TB drive.

Also while the Cooler Master PSU would work fine, I'd look at the Corsair TX 950W or Silverstone 1000W.

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Originally posted by Papadam

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Originally posted by noquarter

Oh I did 1 raid, was a lvl 50 raid in the snow with a spider cave and a dragon at the end, could swear we had 4 groups. It wasn't too bad, slightly boring cuz of the lvl 60's there. I think my burglar wasn't much fun though, gonna go minstrel or RK this round.

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Yes that was Helegrod, LotrOs first raid and it was 24-man, since then all raids have been 12-man instead since most players seems to like that better.
RKs rock :)

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I have a 38 RK, was fun as hell to play. Only concern is I really like playing healers and I don't know if RK's are capable healers end game, everyone seems to want them for nuking?

Oh I did 1 raid, was a lvl 50 raid in the snow with a spider cave and a dragon at the end, could swear we had 4 groups. It wasn't too bad, slightly boring cuz of the lvl 60's there. I think my burglar wasn't much fun though, gonna go minstrel or RK this round.

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Originally posted by Papadam

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Originally posted by noquarter
Sorry but that sounds awesome, my buddy and I had reactivated a few days ago not knowing about this expansion and now I just gotta wait for him to catch up to my char so we can check this stuff out.. er do we have to get 60+ first?

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No skirmishes are for level 30+ and scale for 1/3/6/12 players!

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Wow I totally failed at /quote. And 1/3/6/12?? This sounds awesome.. these skirmishes are what give you the new coins for hand in rewards right, how do those compare to end-game gear? I don't really want to get into huge raids, 10-12 people is a lot of fun but anything past that sucks.

Page 4 rocks, good info. Page 2 and 3 suck except for the lvl 30+ clarification.

This skirmish stuff sounds awesome. I don't find the wide open zones in any MMO to ever be very interesting. If you don't limit my freedom and give me an objective you don't have a carefully crafted exciting adventure waiting for me.

Wide open zones are the sandbox part of MMO's, good for messing around in, leveling up, bad for serious fun. Make them up of nothing but sandbox stuff and it gets boring.

No way, I'm hijacking this thread for people who haven't played skirmishes but think they sound awesome. I hopped into that other thread and read one line and instantly got excited, and it was from one of the naysayers too:

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Skirmishes are instanced scaleable areas with specific objective.

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Sorry but that sounds awesome, my buddy and I had reactivated a few days ago not knowing about this expansion and now I just gotta wait for him to catch up to my char so we can check this stuff out.. er do we have to get 60+ first?

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Originally posted by flguy147
thanks guys,  i will only be using my laptop on it and its mainly just for regular internet use and mmos.  dont do a whole lot else.  maybe download a little music too.  how scary is it buying this refurbished one rather than a brand new one and is it much better than the other one i linked? 
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/D-Link+-+Factory-Refurbished+Xtreme+N+Wireless-N+Gigabit+Gaming+Router+with+4-Port+Switch/9536371.p?id=1218121541446&skuId=9536371&st=router&cp=1&lp=5
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/D-Link+-+Xtreme+N+Wireless-N+Gigabit+Router/8040121.p?id=1157068454881&skuId=8040121&st=router&cp=1&lp=2

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Refurbished would probably be fine for a router. The fancier Gaming one has a display screen that looks kinda cool but won't actually do anything for you. It also is a dual band 2.4ghz/5ghz meaning if the 2.4ghz spectrum is crowded AND your laptop is dual band you can use the 5ghz spectrum instead.

Other than dual band let me explain what you're paying for on those $120 routers that you won't find on the cheaper ones:

1. Wireless N - not necessary for internet as most broadband caps around 15Mbps and Wireless G does 54Mbps, but you can get N on many cheaper routers too.

2. Gigabit ethernet - definitely not necessary for internet, only useful if you're gonna be transferring huge files between home PC's wired to the router. Cheaper routers use 100Mbit.

3. USB port - you access a portable hard drive or printer through the router instead of having to share it through your computer.

4. QoS (prioritize "gaming" traffic) - main selling point, secret is this is only useful if you are clogging your network with other forms of traffic (re: p2p file sharing/torrents) that your gaming traffic could be prioritized over to begin with.

Of the 4 things, Wireless N can be gotten for cheap, Gigabit is unnecessary, USB port is pointless if you have the only PC, and QoS can be implemented with DD-WRT firmware for free on a DD-WRT ready router (it's easier than it sounds, takes 5 minutes).

But from your usage description it sounds like you don't need QoS or Gigabit so I'd just pick up a $60 Wireless N or Wireless G router and not worry about the extras.

The dual band *could* be worth it if your laptop supports it and you live in an apartment complex or use your laptop right next to the microwave, but with ~13 channels to choose from at 2.4ghz it's usually not an issue.

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Originally posted by solareus

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Originally posted by caalem

Just making a game DX11 doesn't make it better, it's just more efficient.
 
The only difference you'd see is a better FPS rate, unless they take the time to actually make new models.

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yet another person who has not even watched the video lol . Watch the video , and then make a post, it would work better then making "assumptions"

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sigh.. you are the one making assumptions. DX11 does not automatically give you tessalation.

The engine still has to be designed for tessellation, the models have to be designed for tessellation. This is a huge undertaking to redesign the engine and models for tessellation this late in the game and not something I foresee Turbine doing.

You can still USE DX11 without redesigning the engine and models for tessellation, and doing so gives you an inherent FPS increase just because of DX11's efficient memory management and cpu utilization but this does not tessellate the models for you! Re: BATTLEFORGE.

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Originally posted by solareus

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Originally posted by Jackdog

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Originally posted by solareus

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Originally posted by Jackdog

nice but looks like the big difference is in the world textures. Gives a lot more depth and more polys to play with. I might buy a new card for it once LoTRO has it implemented and the bugs smoothed out

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Ati 5870 :)

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last ATI card I owned was a 9800 Pro LOL, it was a good card in it's day. Kinda well in love with nvidia cards from EVGA, got 3 of em in various configs in three computers now. Might swap back to ATI next time though. Just have to wait and see what is best bang for the buck this time next summer or fall depending on when Turbine upgrades the engine and gets the bugs worked out.

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trust me, ATI has been reborn. They are the best video cards on the market, the shift has come once again and Nvidia is playing catch up. ATI will be introducing 40nm gpu chips in 2010  as well :)

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This is totally true.. ATI started putting out much better cards and drivers with the last 2 generations, I don't know if it's because of the extra resources they got by being owned by AMD or just refocusing their company but their drivers and cards are solid now. Also the 4770 and all 5x00 GPU's and now Nvidia's Geforce 210 + 220 are already 40nm that's why there's a shortage of 5870's, TSMC is still having problems with the 40nm process.

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Originally posted by solareus

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Originally posted by noquarter

Pretty sure the DX11 enhancements for LoTRO will mostly be performance enhancements, you can do the same stuff in DX10 in DX11 and it'll run faster because it's more efficient. It'd be awesome if they add some tessellation though, I plan on getting a 5770 for xmas :)

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did you even watch the video ?

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Yea, the Uningine video is sweet. What I meant was you can write DX10 code (ie no tesselation or graphics enhancements) in DX11 mode, take no advantage of the new DX11 graphical features, and it will run faster. Like Battleforge did.. graphically there's no difference between Battleforge DX10 and Battleforge DX11 but it benchmarks better because DX11 is more efficient.

So I suspect this is what they're doing with lotro because adding in tessellation at this point would be a lot of work - tessellation isn't an automatic thing just because you're in DX11.. you still have to design it into the engine and define subdivision and displacement maps for the models - but Turbine constantly surprises me with their early adoption so there's no telling.

Also DX11 is backward compatible with DX10 so given DX10's larger installed base now there's no reason to write a game in DX10 over DX11. You can write a tessellated DX11 game and it will run in DX10 by just flipping tessellation off and using the base model. So we should see a quick DX11 adoption.

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Originally posted by NagelFire
So I just replaced my video card earlier and it works.
However, I get this annoying stuttering crash at random times, the comp just "freezes" then does nothing.  There is no blue screen or anything.  Also, Borderlands and Dragon age stopped working the second I put it in and now it doesn't recognize my disk drive, like setups wont start or it will say the whole disk is corrupted.
I hooked up a new power supply and motherboard along with he new video card.

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Was there a pre-existing problem? Why did you get a new PSU and mobo as well, or are all 3 just upgrades? Did you reinstall Windows when you put in the new motherboard? Does the crash only happen during games or what kind of tasks? What video card, motherboard, PSU and CPU are you using now?

Right now it sounds like the mobo is just a lemon or the Southbridge is overheating. If data on your HD is getting corrupted as well it almost definitely is an overheating/bad Southbridge chip on the mobo. It wouldn't hurt to find out what temps your CPU/mobo/GPU are all running at to see if there's any clues there, and memtest86+ is one of the easiest tests to run even though this doesn't sound like a memory problem yet.

I'll agree with the Linksys preference. I've found Netgear to be decent, Belkin terrible. I haven't tried a D-Link router but their network cards have worked great and I've read good things about Buffalo. You don't need anything fancy above $70 if you just want it to get you on the internet.

If you really want, you could go to http://www.dd-wrt.com and try to get a router that is in the database as supported. The DD-WRT firmware adds a lot of functionality deliberately left out of ~$60 routers, and I've been able to get home networks running better just by putting this firmware on there so I could tweak settings.

The Linksys WRT54G2 v1.5 doesn't support DD-WRT unfortunately but the v1.3 does, but looks the actual in-store selection is pretty limited so I'd probably just get the WRT54G2 either way.

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Originally posted by Techleo
  I've had some good success disabling parts of larger drives to increase read speeds on some HD at work. Take a 750gb drive and transform it into a 75gb high speed drive. For the cost its a lot cheaper then getting a SSD. Then again the lack of moving parts in a ssd are quite attactive. 
  Ill get a SSD in a few years when there prices are down to what normal rotational model drives are. It wont be long.

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Oh, when shortstroking a home HD why not allocate the remaining 675gb to a rarely-accessed data storage partition? As long as you don't access that space often, the heads shouldn't end up down there right..?

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Originally posted by TheHatter

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Originally posted by dfan

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Ideally between 64 and 32 bit systems there is no difference. 32 bit windows can allocate 4 gigs total, which is more than enough for any game out there.
 
MMOs tend to load much textures to memory while moving around with your character in the game world, this is the precise moment where ssd has huge impact on performance and enormously reduces this "stuttering".
 

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Man............ you're clueless.
I'm not going to go into a long post about what you're wrong about, because I would have to use every post you've made in this thread and that's way too much writing for something that's simply not worth it.
But let me say this, there is something in everyone of your posts in this thread that go against everything I know about computers.... which is kinda bad. It says either I really don't know anything about computers, despite being on my next to last semester of my Computer Science core.... or you're completely clueless. I admit, that I don't know a whole ton about current hardware models of brands.... but this thread isn't really about that.

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I'm not really sure what he's wrong about.. he's pretty close on everything he's said in this thread. 32 bit Windows can technically use 4GB total RAM (system+video) without PAE mode enabled, MS has it artifically limited to ~3.5GB system to make sure it doesn't break drivers. Windows will only assign 32 bit apps 2GB of RAM even in a 64 bit environment, so all 32 bit games (99% of games) are limited to 2GB of personal RAM.

The reason you want 4GB or more system RAM is so the game can have 2GB of its own while the OS and background tasks have at least 2GB to work with. Ideally the 1.5GB of RAM for OS and 2GB of RAM for game is all that would be used so 32 bit should rarely be outgunned as 64bit doesn't have any inherent speed advantages.

The stuttering during texture loading is precisely what SSD's help at and is why you see a huge increase in minimum fps when using an SSD, and texture loading is primarily short burst random access which SSD excels at and RAID sucks at. It doesn't affect average FPS much because texture streaming doesn't happen all that often.

SSD feels snappy even if RAID is faster at most benchmarks, whichever ones SSD is winning at are the ones that effect user experience - multitasking, loading, latency.. even the cheap ones that have slow write speeds feel quicker at normal use until you have to write out a big file/install a game.

Pretty sure the DX11 enhancements for LoTRO will mostly be performance enhancements, you can do the same stuff in DX10 in DX11 and it'll run faster because it's more efficient. It'd be awesome if they add some tessellation though, I plan on getting a 5770 for xmas :)

Is there an option for neither? :P

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Originally posted by Cleffy
Getting multiple platter based HDDs and putting them in RAID 0 is more effective then getting an equally priced SSD.  You won't get much of a performance increase with either as software developers aren't morons.  The transfer rate of data off an HDD is always slow so most apps are designed to pre-load into memory.  The only thing you will do is speed up boot and load times, or if you run a server you will get a benefit.
Also the point of a Discrete Network Controller is to give you options.  You will always have data transmission errors and lack of priority using the standard realtek gigabyte Lan.  With a Network controller you can hook up to multiple networks, create securities, and create network priority.

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Hmm I disagree on the RAID 0.. no matter how much you build up a platter based HDD RAID you will always be limited by the access time based on platter rotation speed which is the limiting factor in drives now. You get increased throughput but your latency never improves so performance just can't match the SSD's for desktop/gaming tasks which normally require a lot of randeom reads. If you look at SSD's not only do you get quicker load times but you get better minimum frame rates (though avg frame rates remain near the same) because access time is instant, even if RAID's can win on many synthetic tests at the same price point.

It's hard to find benches to show this because everything is synthetic, but if you go back and look at Anandtech's old RAID reviews you can see real world apps load and operate basically the same on RAID or Single, so I'd assume Anand's more recent real world tests would be about the same if RAID were included in the SSD vs VelicoRaptor comparisons. Synthetic benchmarks and server/database usage are clearly different but for regular use SSD's just react far quicker than RAID can.

Also about preloading stuff into memory, yes apps load into RAM and then HD speed doesn't really matter, but the part we're talking about is getting them into RAM to begin with, and games can't preload all their data regardless.

Acrobatics is a dangerous travel power, I love the power but it's really a pain in the ass to use whereas teleport makes the game trivial since you can disengage any fight you are losing.

The first thing you should pick up in your first few levels is an AoE attack for killing henchmen, the 2nd thing you should pick up around 10 or so is a defensive passive - regeneration will fix ANY build and is the best for leveling up. Unless you really know how the game works it can be hard without a defensive passive especially if you are melee or using Acrobatics to get around.

Also the mobs running away only happens if you are in a "group" even if it's just because 2 other people are very close by. It's a retarded system.. best thing to do is avoid other people or, for MA, get shuriken throw + chain kumai advantage to make it reel the target in.

The Dragon Lunge will flip backwards if you aren't moving, so you have to be moving/jumping when you hit it, it's really stupid setup because I don't know ANY occasion where a melee would want to slowly backflip 10 feet when all the mobs have ranged attacks and will just start shooting you instead of punching you. (btw dragon lunge had 0 cooldown in beta so you could spam the hell out of it, made melee really fun because you could always get to the mob you want to fight!)