Fatal_Papercut~SPARTA~

Technically, yes, although I would advise using something--preferably a stand built for this specific purpose--to keep it at least two inches above the floor for a few reasons: * Anything spilled on the ground nearby would be much less likely to get inside the case. * BUGS--real life bugs, not programming code--would be less likely to make your PC their new home. * No static build-up from direct contact with the carpet. * Not the most likely scenario, but any sort of event that might flood your office will ruin pretty much ANYTHING on the floor, especially a computer. With my case, the PSU sits on the bottom, not the top; you can imagine how that would be a problem. * 68% of women surveyed said that they prefer to date men who keep their PCs a minimum of four inches above the floor. 60% said they prefer at least six inches. 35% said they wouldn't settle for anything less than 10 inches. Only 5% said that inches don't matter and that it's how you use your PC that counts.

I just purchased mine a week ago, and the price had already dropped to $215 USD (or it may have been at that price only with a promo code, but either way...) I have it OCed to 3.8GHz on air cooling and one tiny voltage tweak, but it does heat up to 53C on full load. I'm not going to push it further unless I get a better aftermarket cooler; I'm looking at a couple of Zalmans right now. It idles just fine, though, at 42C. It's a beast, and AMD's Phenom II X4 series goes toe-to-toe with Intel when it comes to gaming performance; Intel DOES win when it comes to stuff like video encoding (yawn!) although not by a large enough margin to justify the price difference, at least not to me. Don't get me wrong, I like Intel, and they're great innovators; the consumer CPU market wouldn't be where it is right now without them. I also like Ferrari, they make great cars and it would be fun to drive one to work every day, but legally I wouldn't be able to drive it any faster than I can drive my current vehicle that costs hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars less.

I have no idea what your budget is, but here's half of the solution: The AMD Phenom II X4 940 can be had for $150 brand new, and a good, compatible mobo will run you about $80-$100 (no onboard video). This is what I had before I built my new rig, and I OCed it from the stock speed of 3GHz up to 3.4GHz just on air cooling and without any voltage tweaks. Of course, you'll also need RAM, a new GPU, and the one thing that people always seem to overlook until the last minute: a solid PSU--it must have the minimum wattage and amp ratings, the correct CPU power connector (4 or 8 pins) and the right PCI-E power connectors (6 or 8 pins or even both). If just the above is already out of your current budget, then I would advise waiting until you can get something comparable. Either way, I have to agree with others: it would be a waste of money to spend anything to squeeze the last bit of performance out of your current rig, and a low-or-mid range dual core that seems like a bargain now will be something you'll probably regret later. A VERY fast dual-core would actually be ok for a year or so, but after that year you'll still be stuck with very limited upgrade options. If you go AMD, go with an AM3 socket mobo for future upgrading, and if you go Intel, the LGA 1366 or 1156 sockets will provide the most options in the near future. As one gamer to another, I sincerely hope that you can find a solution that allows you to play the games you want at a reasonable price.

Original post in this thread: August 10th, 2009. On that very same day, NASA Satellites observed severe flooding rains from deadly Typhoon Morakot. Typhoon Morakot brought enormous amounts of rainfall to Taiwan and China and NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) estimated it from space. The monster Typhoon Morakot that was over 1,000 miles in diameter last week brought widespread damage to Taiwan and China as it crossed Taiwan and made landfall over the weekend in mainland China. Coincidence? I don't think so.

One thing to keep in mind is that Arma2 is a game that is VERY taxing on the CPU. While you may have read this someplace else, I know from first-hand experience. I just built a new rig with a faster CPU but I kept my GPUs (dual GTX 280s in SLI). I'm using the exact same config settings as before (I copied my old config/profile file to the new installation), and I'm seeing and average increase of 10fps; for a game like Arma2, that's a significant improvement.

I've enjoyed the time I spent playing with the Win7 RC, but as someone else mentioned, there's no major performance difference between Win7 and Vista--especially for gaming. I'm running Vista Home Premium 64-bit (now with SP2! stays crunchy in milk!) Seeing as how I just built a new rig, I'm not keen on shelling out another $120 or more to upgrade to Win7 anytime soon. On the other hand, if I were still running XP, switching to Win7 would be a no-brainer. Which is good. Because I don't have a brain. Oh yeah, and get 64-bits, because, you know, it's like, TWICE as many bits as 32, maybe more, I dunno, all that binary technical math stuff is 10 confusing for me. And make sure you request the disc (round) version; mine came on a trapezoid and was extremely difficult to install.

Personally, I've always used Nvidia cards in my own systems. I'm not a fanboy, so I have no particular disposition or reason to dislike ATI products, but I have run into one consistent problem with the four or so ATI cards I've installed for other people: fan speed management. Any decent gaming-capable GPU is going to run hot, and for the life of me, I have not been able to get ATI's own CatalystCC or other things like RivaTuner to adequately manage fan speed. RivaTuner worked sometimes, but it would inexplicably forget the custom settings and go back to default (slow) fan speeds, thereby causing overheating issues that led to problems like missing textures or the lovely BSOD. I'm glad ATI is out there providing competition that keeps Nvidia's prices from moving beyond the stratosphere, and one of these days there's going to be a very compelling reason to use one of their cards for one of my machines. *** WARNING: Old Fart Nostalgia Alert *** While I can't recall what happened to my very first 3D card--the Diamond Monster 3D II--I still have my 3Dfx Voodoo 5 around here somewhere. I remember being amazed not only by its size (it looked like a green cricket bat sawed in half) but also by the fact that it required one of the molex connectors from my PSU just to function. It ran so hot that it shut down a couple of times during a few LAN parties, but it was still awesome.

Howdy! Oh joy of joys, my new system is complete! Everything has been re-installed, and after one more evening of defragmenting and backing-upping of data, I'll be ready to join in the fray once more! In case you might be wondering what re-installing everything involves, this should give you some idea... Keep in mind that A) not everything is fitting in this picture, this doesn't account for the 10 or so games that I don't have boxes for because they were purchased thru Steam or Impulse, and C) there's all the other stuff that isn't a game of some sort. "ooooh, look at the pretty boxes!"

I certainly hope so as well, otherwise a long-term institutionalization for me would be in everyone's best interest.

Howdy Folks, I go by Fatal_Papercut (or some minor variation thereof) in every game I play, online or otherwise, so if you've seen that name somewhere before, yeah, I'm sure it was me. I'm 40-years-old, and I've been gaming ever since I convinced my parents that an Atari VCS (aka 2600) was absolutely critical to my development as a functioning member of society (by this, I mean that the VCS allowed me to spend more time at home playing games and less time at seedy arcades blowing my lunch money.) I eventually graduated to an Atari 800 computer (with the Indus GT floppy drive, no less), and by the time I was able to get my hands on an Apple ][e (HS freshman year), it was obvious to everyone that computers and gaming were going to be an important part of my life. This fact was probably most obvious to the girl that I'd bugged for three weeks to go out with me--after I stood her up to go to what was essentially a precursor to LAN parties (a bunch of my buddies and I gathering in one location to play games on our Atari 800 computers all night long). I'm particularly attached to my collection of games--original packaging included in most cases--that dates back to the Atari days. I somehow managed to store the boxes in the most out-of-the-way places so that my mom wouldn't throw them away until I got my own place. I'm especially fond of my collection of Infocom text adventures, because the packaging for most of those games was half the fun of having them. I'm sure there a quite a few of you reading this that are nodding your heads in agreement without my need to describe anything further. My eventual goal is to travel backwards in time with my current computer system (a fairly high-end rig hooked up to a 42-inch 1080p LCD) and completely blow the minds of everyone at the Atari Users Group meetings I attended (circa 1983) by demonstrating Arma2, Crysis, World In Conflict, and a few other games, before disappearing like a mysterious stranger, never to be seen or heard from again. The plan then is to take my machine to Intel and sell it to them for a billion dollars so that they can reverse-engineer it. So everybody wins: I'll be a billionaire, and by the time we get to 2009 in this new alternate time-line, computer technology will be sufficiently advanced so that the Arma2 of today would be comparable to the games I played on my Atari VCS thirty years ago. As an added bonus, my CPU is made by AMD, so I'll be playing a good joke on Intel without them even knowing it. However, until my Flux Capacitor arrives (I knew I should have ordered it from NewEgg!), I figured it would be fun to hang out here and terrorize the virtual citizens of Chernarus with the rest of y'all. Please be patient with me until I finish building my new system; it will be done by Friday, and my Steam Games should all be reinstalled by the week's end. In addition to my enthusiasm for the game, I also bring what I consider to be decent video-editing skills to the table. Since the addition of HD content to YouTube, I've deleted my old low-def videos and started fresh, but I do have a few new ones available for viewing at: http://www.youtube.com/user/dcalpha007 Looking forward to working with you on the virtual battlefield...