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Originally posted by Xion1985
HAF 932 Black Full tower NoPS  
Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz
WD 640gb 64M 7200 SATA 3 Caviar Black
8GB(2x4GB) DDR3 PC10600 1333MHz Matched Pair Crucial
Asus P8P67 PRO Aud/GbLan/SATA6Gpbs/RAID/1394/USB3.0 ATx 
LiteOn Ihos 104 4x Blu Ray
Antec True Power 650W
MS Windows 7 64bit
Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic 1gb
I think from what I've gathered this seems decent. 

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Unless you have specific needs for memory 4GB is good. Windows will only assign a 32-bit application up to 2GB of memory (99.5% of games are 32-bit still), leaving 2GB for Windows and all your background apps which is plenty.

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Originally posted by Xion1985
Your right I did forget to link my power supply
Antec EarthWatts 650W EPS
I can afford to get the caviar black, to be honest I didn't really know there was much of a difference.
It actually looks like it may save me money to go the route of something like this instead
Asus P8P67 LE Aud/GbLan/SATA6Gbps/USB3/1394/RAID ATX
Core i7 2600 3.4GHz 8MB LGA1155 Onboard GPU
 

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But yea, you should be looking at an i5-2500k with 4GB of ram, decent p67 mobo, WD Black OR an SSD + WD Green, ~650W PSU, Radeon 6950 or Geforce 570 GTX..

That's pretty much top of the line without getting extorted for halo products.

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Originally posted by Loke666

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Originally posted by Quizzical
No, no, no.  Unless you're getting some great clearance prices somewhere, you're massively overpaying for obsolete parts.  Don't get a Bloomfield.  Get a Sandy Bridge.  That will get you a lot better performance for a lot cheaper, with lower power consumption, easier overclocking, and likely the option of future upgrades.
A WD Caviar Green is fine for bulk data storage, but you don't want to run real programs off of that.  It's too slow.  If you're only getting a hard drive and no SSD, then get a WD Caviar Black instead.
Also, you're missing a power supply.  It's really important to get a good quality power supply, so don't just grab something at random if you don't know what it is.

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Agreed.
Caviar green is slow as hell. I prefer Seagate myself but have a few Caviar black as well, they are not bad.
As for the PSU I would probably go for a Corsair 650W but it depends a bit on which GFX card that is intended for it.

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If you're playing a few specific MMO's you should try to find out which hardware the ones you play run on better too.

If you truly plan to upgrade to SSD in the near future you may just want a Caviar Blue or even Green since it will become your storage drive once you're on SSD. I have a Green just for storage and it's fine since it rarely gets used but to stream a movie.

Great build though, just note what terroni pointed out with the ram, i5-2500k is dual channel so you want 2 sticks not 3.

Except the best mob solution is to immediately run away when PCs enter aggro range and alert as many other mobs as they can.

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Originally posted by cheyane
Just because your quest log has 25  quests it does not mean you have to do all of them at once. Nor is it an exercise in bunching them up in one area and finishing them off chop... chop. That is why you run out of content. When you use an express way to eat up the content you lose vital things. You lose the actual feeling of familiarity that comes from venturing into an area multiple times and realising that there might be another quest that you recall faintly being told to do.
 
We lost the romance of games and questing.It is all a business venture these days and even when it is your very first toon you do not take the time to smell the roses.
 
I recall the days of sitting in one place and camping mobs with no quests even to break up the fighting. Even then continuous forays to an area taught us so much about interaction and mob pathways among other things. But all that is gone and even that will be gone too in EQ 2 especially since so much has been done to it to bring it in line to the easier games out there. See crafting.

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I recall the days of sitting in one place as well. In fact I was looking for a game to do that in again because it was fun. I don't need quests but if the game expects me to quest to level up they better make it sane.

The reason why you have to do all quests in an area at once is because of travel time, not because of express way to level 60. If I didn't have to spend 10 minutes running from the quest to the hand in then find out I missed a quest and spend 10 minutes running back out and 10 minutes running back in again, it wouldn't be a big deal.

Give me a fast mount, give me quests I can organize geographically, or give me sit down and camp.

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Originally posted by cheyane
A very important aspect of learning about the surroundings and the area you are in is dependent on the willingness of people to explore. Unfortunately people want the quests marked clearly to avoid exploring and then they wonder why games are shallow. It is  circular thinking I guess. You cannot have interesting and depth in quests if you refuse to commit to them by even bothering to read them and figuring out where to go. Laziness in terms of wanting things handed to you is the downfall of the current quest system.

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Problem is the world designers know something you don't, and sometimes figuring out what their thought process was when writing quest details leads you down the wrong track and becomes a problem. I remember a quest in LotRO which the only description of the location was 'past the big tree on top of the hill outside town'.

I'm not exactly sure where town ends, I don't know how far 'past' is, I see hills every direction, and all the trees look big to me. Half an hour of frustration ensued for a simple lowbie quest. It's not bad having to read quests when it works, but it's when a disconnect happens that it becomes a game killing experience when there are other MMO's that won't give you that problem.

The other problem is organizing multiple quests that happen in the same area. I can read through and figure out a few quests at a time without getting frustrated but when I have 20 quests in my log it becomes very tedious because even though all 20 quests happen in only 4 areas I end up running to each area 5 times instead just once.

In game quest helpers move people away from using web resources to supplement the game which detracts from the gaming experience more than the quest helpers do imo.

I only played for about 15 seconds with keyboard and mouse before switching over the my Xbox 360 controller. 100% designed for playing with a controller, only thing I use my mouse for is to set the zoom level of the camera before I start playing.

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Originally posted by F2Pelerin118
Hey, that Viewsonic Monitor isn't LED backlit, they cost too much for me and no I'm not in the US, I'm from NZ. So everythings expensive, not to mention I don't know alot about Hardware so I just had to go by advice I've been given - how I ended up with that build.
But in any case, I don't really have the money to buy any additional stuff or upgrade much really - the way it is, how does that PC look?
The only 2 things I'm thinking about and can afford, is upgrading the PSU to 700W and getting 8GB (2 X 4) of RAM. What do you think?

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Your build is perfect as is. I'd take an i5-2500k over the lower end i7's too, triple channel memory is nice but i5-2500k > i7-930 and cheaper. I wouldn't bother with the extra RAM.

I'm not familiar with AcBel PSU's but the in depth review I could find for it suggested it was good quality but poor value, but that review had it priced much higher than it is on the site you linked. So the AcBel is probably your best deal and you shouldn't need a 700W for any reason. If you do want to upgrade the PSU the Zalman ZM600-HP, Corsair HX-650 and Silverstone Element ST75EF are all excellent PSU's, but I don't think it's worth the extra money since the AcBel is 88 Plus Silver rated and got a decent review.

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Originally posted by acerpg007

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Originally posted by noquarter
I'm level 13 too and getting a little bored of fighting. I think it was my choice of 2h hammer. I also feel I don't have enough energy EVER to use my abilities enough to have fun. The first few levels were fun because I could blast each mob once or even twice and not fall behind on energy. Now if I use more than 1 power every other mob I'm usually gonna fall behind on energy.

I think I would have more fun using martial weaponry but it's hard to get motivated to start over even though I'm only a day or 2 in.

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Are you a 2-hand hammer? and are you Superspeed? get the drain energy skill and the last skill in the right side of the skill tree for energy. Hammer isn't your typical energy builder weapon class so you have to find other alternatives to get that boost. But what is good about it is that the last smash hit is so strong.

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Yup I do love the mega smash it's the only fun thing about my character lol. I went nature to do healing but I never have any energy to heal people with. I've seen sorcery spec players just blow me away in healing. I don't know if it because nature is weak or because I can't build enough energy to cast my heals with.

I'm acrobatics though so I can't take the super speed skill you were talking about. What weapon type is best for energy building?

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Originally posted by LauZaIM
Unreal Tournament 3 has AA, I can also force 32xAA and it runs very very well. Imagine that. I think SoE was just being lazy and/or didn't really care.

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It doesn't have AA as an in-game option. The UE3 engine itself doesn't support AA directly so you must be forcing it on through the driver panel.

I'm going to install the game later today and check myself because I've never heard of UT3 having AA and there's an old trick of renaming game executables to UT3.EXE to trick the video card drivers into enabling AA through the driver panel which only exists because UT3.EXE needed a driver option to force AA to begin with.

Even if Epic did eventually add AA support to UT3 it wasn't included in the UE3 engine that gets licensed out and it would bring the very short list of UE3 games with AA to an AA routine written by Epic themselves for UT3 and an AA routine written by nVidia engineers for Batman: Arkham Asylum. 2 very talented groups of 3d programmers.

I'm level 13 too and getting a little bored of fighting. I think it was my choice of 2h hammer. I also feel I don't have enough energy EVER to use my abilities enough to have fun. The first few levels were fun because I could blast each mob once or even twice and not fall behind on energy. Now if I use more than 1 power every other mob I'm usually gonna fall behind on energy.

I think I would have more fun using martial weaponry but it's hard to get motivated to start over even though I'm only a day or 2 in.

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Originally posted by JeroKane

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Originally posted by krea
Game is running on unreal engine most games on that engine dont have AA since it just go well togheter with the game engine . Dont think it looks bad tho only thing i want to have is high texture settings since we cannot enable them now.

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 Euhh what??  Unreal Engine has always supported AA. So what are you talking about?
It's SOE's own engine (they used for SWG and EQ2) that doesn't support AA via ingame settings (altho you can hardware override it or hack the settings file).
If this game doesn't support AA, then SOE has deliberately deactivated the option or were just lazy (as usual) and didn't bother to add the option in the settings.

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No he's right.

Unreal Engine 3 uses deferred rendering and doesn't support anti-aliasing out of the box. Doing AA on it is trickier since you lose all the geometry data by the time the scene is complete due to the deferred rendering technique. Very few UE3 games have AA, Batman: Arkham Asylum is the only one I can even think of but I believe there is 1 other UE3 game with AA that I can't remember off the top of my head.

You can often force anti-aliasing through drivers though, but the engine itself doesn't support AA and developers have to go out of their way to deliberately modify UE3's engine to support it, which most developers are not interested in doing since they license the engine specifically so they don't need to learn and write the underpinnings of the 3d engine.

Who is your ISP? Are you using a router and what model is it? Do you always experience lag or only specific times, weather, actions.. one person would get laggy only when using the mouse because of an IRQ conflict.

You should also check your ping and packet loss in game. I'm not sure which MMO's tell you this. Last MMO I really played that had good connection stats was Champions Online but I'm sure some of the others have good info.

Packet loss is important because it can cause worse lag than a high ping. If you have bad packet loss you will need to get your ISP over to clean up your signal. It will usually be listed as a % someplace near the ping. Like 57ms 0% packet loss.

You can also check the signal levels on your cable modem by browsing to http://192.168.100.1
Downstream power level should be between -8 dBmV and +8 dBmV (mine is -3 dBmV)
Upstream power level should be between +37 dBmV and +55 dBmV (45 dBmV for me)
Signal to Noise ratio should be over 30 dB (mine is 39 dB)

If you haven't power cycled your modem and router for a while you should. Unplug from the wall and wait a few seconds then plug it back in.

If you use p2p apps like bittorrent then you should help your router out by using DD-WRT firmware if you can. P2P apps can bog down a router by leaving half open connections even after you close the app. If the router firmware doesn't have good connection management it can get laggy and require a power cycle to clean up.

Also if you have had your cable/dsl modem for a while you should take it into your ISP and exchange it for a newer one. They upgrade models every few years and you should take advantage of the fact you are leasing your box from them to keep up to date as it only takes a second to swap (if there's no people in line).

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Originally posted by Fadedbomb
Optical drives have zero improvement over the past 8 years. There's no where else to go with them other than increasing their dust protection....and only Light-On is doing that.

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Just wanted to point out that there is a difference in performance between optical drives, the Samsung S223 is actually overall the fastest drive (access time, read/write speeds). It's just that no one cares much because people don't rely on DVD drives. But it's only $17 so not like you are paying a premium for it.

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Originally posted by Loke666
I would do a few changes. Samsungs screens are a lot better than ASUS, they are the best on the market.

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Samsung screens are nice but Asus does make good monitors actually, the VH236H was the 2nd best rated gaming monitor from whichever tech reviews I was researching when I bought mine (due to it being one of the fewer 2ms refresh rate monitors). The one above it was a 24" (don't remember the make) which wouldn't match my Eyefinity setup.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Asus monitors use Samsung panels in them, most Dells are Samsung panels and some Philips panels.

edit: one list has the Asus as #6 for gaming monitors: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=39226
The monitors above it are expensive due to being 120Hz 3d, 1920x1200, or IPS, so to me it's the best affordable gaming monitor on that list.

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Originally posted by comerb
The only advantage the PS3 has is that you can play it on a bigscreen TV.  Now, it will look like crap warmed over on a bigscreen compared to a nice monitor on the PC... but yah.  Even if you prefer the controller, you can just hook one up to your PC.

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Yea, but you can hook your PC up to your TV too if you have a long HDMI cable or aren't too lazy to move your PC over there :)

I'd been thinking about the same thing and was hoping someone who's played both could go over the differences.

My thoughts..

Graphics - PC has a clear edge here. Higher resolutions, anti-aliasing, effects, etc. Reading text for quests and chat would be easier. And you can always hook up your PC to your TV if you want big screen + couch.

Controls - Never seen an MMO that could be handled better on controller over keyboard + mouse. If it is the case that this game plays better on a controller then you could use a controller on your PC (I play many PC games with my Xbox 360 controller), seems advantage would go to PC for having more options.

Community - Unless the PS3 version lets you use a keyboard I can't see a strong community on PS3 at all. Voice chat will help but no text for chat channels is going to kill communication. Guild organization has to be pretty weak on console.

So in my evaluation PC has every advantage over PS3 here but I'm still interested in 1st hand account.

Ok that is one thing I *don't* want to see Cryptic doing, wasting IP licenses with their games. While I said CO was fun I do still find Cryptic's games rather lacking overall and don't think they will be able to make a really good MMO, so why waste the NWN license..