Hajimoto

It is with great honor and privilege that present to you my Hajimoto birthday wishes......

Well as you know Watchy, I have zero will power....

GRFS Update! On day one they produced and distributed a patch that added/changed the following: Main changes: · Improved stability in online multiplayer matches; · Improved voice chat quality for PCs running Windows Vista; · Improved navigation through game's menus. The PC day-one update also includes the improvements from the latest title update for the console version: · Introduced 6-man party system in the multiplayer game mode; · Balanced several weapons (assault rifles, SMSGs, handguns, shotguns); · Balanced equipment (grenades, flash bang, EMP, stun guns, number of drones in match); · Adjusted aim sensitivity and quick scope; · Fixed map exploits; · Adjusted melee; · Adjusted XP values; · Several technical / network improvements. The approximate size of this update is 385 MB. Click here to read the entire UBI post. The one change that jumps out and punches me right in the eye, is the addition or expansion to a 6 man team co-op. Am I reading this line correctly that the PC version now has the 6 man co-op like the console?? I have the game installed and played for a few hours yesterday but only with 1 other player. Has anyone played with a 6 person squad yet? Comments please.

Hajimoto

I am down with this idea... now let me me blow the dust off this thing and wheres my mouse.......

I was laughing so hard that tears where rolling down my cheeks when they pulled the car in to the garage and the A-Team music started to play and the car just flopped to the ground. LOL Thanks for the belly laugh, that was great!

You can always tell when it is E3 time........

Bill says "I never said that"

I made a quick tutorial for those that wish to use their Steam overlay while playing Diablo III. Because some are not able to watch the video because of "BLOCK" reasons, I have also included a step by step walk through below. [YT]qIL7w9qR6v4[/YT] Verbose Step by Step Method Navigate to your install directory of Diablo III. Right Click on "Diablo III Launcher.EXE" and click on properties & Click compatibility tab. Check the box for "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" Select Windows XP (Service Pack 3). Click Apply in the lower right corner. Navigate to the Steam LIBRARY section of the Steam interface. Click on "ADD A GAME" in the lower left corner and select "Add a Non-Steam game". While the list is populating, click "BROWSE" and navigate to your Diablo III installation folder. Select the file "Diablo III Launcher.exe" & Click "Open" in the lower right corner. When you're back to the Steam "Add a Game" interface, click on "ADD SELECTED PROGRAMS". Navigate to the newly added "Diablo III Launcher" and right click and select properties. Rename from "Diablo III Launcher" to "Diablo III" (only edit the top entry not the .EXE line). Launch the newly added/edited entry in your games library. Enjoy yo!

You said it Noob! LOL I think what you are seeing here is result of some activity that recently took place where a game called Path Of Exile, allowed people to donate cash to the cause with reward of some in game items (shop cash) plus the ability to participate in the closed BETA program. The developers received over $200,000.00 dollars US (read story here), so it does not come as a big surprise that every independent developer from this day forward is going to use this as a vehicle to generate developer needed dollars. So get used to seeing this "Pay to BETA" as round 1 followed by a Kickstarter round 2. It is important to note that the POE donation campaign never guarantees a completed product to any of its 'DONORS'. Mark my words, in the very near future, there will be a dude that will collect 100's of thousands of dollars from one of these campaigns and disappear with all the cash.

PCI-E 2.0 vs. PCI-E 3.0 with the GTX 690 When the GTX 680 was first launched, I assumed that its performance would be slowed on anything but a PCI-E 3.0 slot. NVIDIA had other ideas since their post release drivers all dialed its bandwidth back to PCI-E 2.0 when used on X79-based systems. The reasons for this were quite simple: while the interconnects are built into the Sandy Bridge E chips, Intel doesn't officially support PCI-E 3.0 though their architecture. As such, some performance issues arose in rare cases when running two cards or more on some X79 systems. This new GTX 690 uses an internal PCI-E 3.0 bridge chip which allows it to avoid the aforementioned problems. But with a pair of GK104 cores beating at its heart, bottlenecks could presumably occur with anything less than a full bandwidth PCI-E 3.0 x16 connection. This could cause issues for users of non-native PCI-E 3.0 boards (like P67, Z68 and even X58) that want a significant boost to their graphics but don't want to upgrade to Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge-E. In order to test how the GTX 690 reacts to changes in the PCI-E interface, we used our ASUS X79WS board which can switch its primary PCI-E slots between Gen2 and Gen3 through a simple BIOS option. All testing was done at 2560 x 1600 in order to eliminate any CPU bottlenecks. While some of you may not have been expecting these results, they prove that anyone with a PCI-E 2.0 motherboard won't have to run out for a last minute upgrade. We hardly saw any variance between the two interfaces and in the few cases where there was a discernable difference, it was well within the margin of error. Skyrim is the odd game out but we'll get to that later. Let's explain what's happening here since it all centers around the complex dance between the CPU, GPU and their interconnecting buses. At higher framerates, a ton of information is passed through the PCI-E interface as the GPU calls on the processor to fetch more frames. This potentially causes a lower bandwidth PCI-E bus to become saturated. At higher resolutions and image quality settings like the ones used in the tests above, the GPU becomes the bottleneck so it calls for less frames from the CPU, leading to the PCI-E interface being less of a determining factor in overall performance. This brings us to our next point: users may still encounter a bandwidth bottleneck but only when the CPU has to send large batches of frames off to the GPU, something that doesn't typically happen at higher resolutions. We'd normally see that kind of situation when the GPU is operating at ultra high framerates. This is why Skyrim ?which still seems oddly CPU bound at 2560 x 1600- sees an ever so slight benefit from PCI-E 3.0. Naturally, higher clocked processors can throw out more frames which is why overclocking your CPU can result in a potential PCI-E bottleneck. But once again, with a GPU as powerful as the GTX 690, a situation like this will only happen at framerates so high that it won't cause any noticeable in-game performance drop offs. In order to put our summations into context, we've repeated some of the tests below at lower resolutions / IQ settings. The three games chosen were the only ones that displayed a clear difference after multiple benchmark run-throughs. As you can see, there is a falloff here that's beyond our margin of error but even in this case, the GTX 690 with an overclocked processor is able to push such high framerates that a few percentage points won't make one lick of difference. With a lower clocked CPU, the gap would be even less. So let's sum this up: while PCI-E 3.0 can make a minor on-paper difference in some situations, it certainly isn't needed to ensure your GTX 690 is the fastest graphics card on the block. If you have a PCI-E 2.0 motherboard with a decent processor, an upgrade to a Gen3 interface really isn't necessary. This story was straight up stolen from The Hardware Canucks, click HERE to read the original story.

I envy you!!! Freaking awesome Thanks for sharing your passion with the rest of us man.

I was under the impression that this thread was to make recommendations for a GAMING rig for under $700? Based on a rig that will be only be used for gaming, a 6 core is a waste of money, I covered that in my original post. I am not trying to defend Intel or AMD, I am sharing recommendations for your gaming rig. This will be the last post I make in this thread that wastes my time it what is fast becoming a fanboy argument. If you want my opinion on hardware or configurations, let me know.

I am not sure I understand the relevance of a claim of biased reporting as it relates to gaming performance of CPU's in real world tests. The chart was not intended to be the sole source of information for which I made my recommendation, it was simply referred to as a grouping or curve of performance of conventional CPU's. I would have to say that you would be hard pressed to dispute the accuracy of the position of today's CPU's in that list whether you believe Toms Hardware or not.

Please note this post is a cut and paste of the response that was written and posted @ the ECWC-HQ Forums Skaz - First let me take a little bit of time to clarify some things. When someone is looking to build a gaming rig my very first question to them is "whats your budget" the second is " what is the primary function of the rig going to be?", once I have this information I put together the most performance for the dollar, PERIOD!. I have never directed a person towards a brand or product based on my personal preferences. My recommendations are based on the intended use of the rig and how much money the person has to spend. My personal experiences with brand names are just that, my experience. I do not read an article that speaks badly of a certain name brand and take that as the gospel, my opinions are formed from building 100's of rigs coupled with me laying out my own hard earned dollars to buy and use them for myself. Witht hat said, if I say that prodect X is better than product Y it is because I did it... I paid the cash to make that claim. AMD and Intel both have their respective markets and AMD has always offered the more affordable build. The problem comes into play when someone pulls the trigger on certain build and later says "Hey, how come this build doesn't do this?" or "Why can't this thing do that?" The buyer has to be completely honest as to what the system will be used for. If you want to mainly play games on the rig, that is part of the question. You also have to decide what level you want the games to perform at. You need to look intot he games that you want to play and research what the hardware requirements are experience that title at the level you wish to play it at. In my opinion the CPU speed is more important than the video card for an initial build. You can ALWAYS upgrade the VPU for better performance later but you can not always simply upgrade the CPU without concidering Memory Speed Requirements, Motherboard CPU Socket Conciderations and CPU Generation capatibilites. It sounds like Vanquish is offering the very capable 6970 for an extremely attractive price. You can then invest those dollars into your CPU and primary boot device (SSD). I would recommend a CPU with a minimum 3.4-3.8GHZ out the gate. A CPU with a clock speed of this as a minimum, will ensure a good gaming experience. A helpful tip is to know where the CPU performance curves are and then price the CPU according to where you want to be on the ladder. Refer to the below chart for an example of what I mean when I say "Performance Curve". Click image for full story As you can see when it comes to gaming performance, Intel is alone at the top on a lot of formats. Meaning a dude on a budget could buy an i3-2130 for $150 and out perform ANY AMD chip currently made. This is not an opinion, it is budget and performance. You get more performance for the dollar (currently) in the i3 and i5 CPU's. Now saying all this, it sounds like you have your mind made up on the AMD, great choice, now just buy as much processor and SSD as your wallet will allow. Something like a 975 Black would be the same $150 and will give good solid gaming performance. Also do not fall for the hype associated with 6 core or 8 core processors. You are gaming..... a strong 4 core at high frequency will result in very satifying game sessions. The high count multi core CPU's only start to show there muscle when you use programs that fully take advantage of them like video editing, encoding, protein folding or CAD intensive applications. Keep inmind that only a handful of games actually take advantage of multi core CPU's such as BF3, TW2 and Metro 2033. It is important to note that games today are mainly GPU dependant rather than CPU dependant and the reason for buying a strong CPU is so you are not in the market doing a full system upgrade based on the CPU, MB and RAM being too slow. Typically your GPU purchases will be 3-4 times before you need to consider a CPU upgrade. That being said a video card for todays games should have at least 2GB on board for todays games. Textures drawn on the screen take up space in the video ram (VRAM) so they can load a lot faster, so when you are on a higher resolution you can see more textures, which takes up more VRAM. In games like Shogun2 with all the settings turned up to high resolutions it will take up to 2GB of VRAM. But again, the deal that Vanq is offering is so sweet you can turn textures down and be happy An 8 core gamer @ 4.0GHZ will not see any game perfomance increases over a 4 core 4.0GHZ gamer..... so be smart in your CPU selection. Either by a fast CPU or buy a CPU that can be OC'd to be fast (requires better cooling and a MB that allows for tweaking and adjustments). Please let me know if this response helped you in any way and please reply if you need more information on anything specifically.

I am a huge Mechwarrior fan but these screen shots as well as others I have seen, look 2-D'ish to me. They look like artist renditions of what the game will look like rather than actual in game captures. It is hard to describe but it looks and feels like the Mech is not a part of the world it is shown in.

Whats Arma III?

Better late than never heh Rizz?? Happy Birthday man! Unrelated but funny

I hope you have an awesome Birthday Panic!

Just a bit Batty? LOL

Short Answer: Yes Long Answer: Even after considerable beta testing and not being very fond of the watered down rune system, as opposed to the developers vision of 3000 runes that random dropped which are used to augment a players abilities. Guaranteeing unique character builds that would never get stale. Even after the announcement that PVP will not be a part of the retail release, but distributed later as a DLC/Patch. Even after only being exposed to static towns and static layouts through out the countryside. Even though after all of my beta testing, never experiencing the dynamic dungeons or dynamic environments that Diablo is famous for. YES. Keep in mind I still enjoy Titan Quest Immortal Throne, so I am banking on the fact that, there is no way D3 can be LESS of an experience than TQ:IT........Right??.... Right? Kal??