Posted 01/18/2009 at 03:46:25am

well, I was a bit harsh on the 4870s, but mainly because they already deliver great preformance in all games but Crysis, so Crysis-wise they're not the greatest (neither is any vid card at this point, I'm confident that even 2 295s struggle at 2560x1200). About the 4 grand thing though-this is obviously an overpriced PC, I made a PC that was top of the line a month ago for 3500, and everything was a heck of a lot better than here, and it plays Crysis allright, plus its not Crytek's fault, and in fact, I praise them for raising the bar on graphics manufacturing so high, otherwise they'd get lazy.

Posted 01/17/2009 at 01:38:45pm

I might surprise you, but no, I don't, mainly because whoever designed this model was a complete idiot. Intel board - what? You can get at least a 4-5fps bonus in Crysis just by switching to a D6T Asus. 2 4870s? Coupled with an 965 with a STOCK HEATSINK? Are you kidding me? And then, on top of this add on a lovely Intel SSD, as if they're marketing this piece of crap at video-editors/CAD users who all use Quadro anyways. It's like the designers mixed great components with terrible ones for a laugh; great CPU, shite vid cards, Gret Mem and Storage, terrible mobo, terrible cooling

Posted 01/17/2009 at 01:30:33pm

You know, you might be surprised to find out that people who buy a 965 don't leave it OC'd to 3.6, but in fact leave it on a stable OC of 4.4 or more, because they want a) a stable overclock, and b) actually be able to reach that frequency. So, no, I'll have to disagree, it's not stupid at all to buy a 1,000$ proc, and you're making me think that you're just bitter because you can't afford such expensive parts. The rest of your well-thought out paragraph supports my opinion. Not to sound holier-than-thou, but maybe you should be more respectful of people who can afford these parts because they studied their notebooks.

 P.S. The one area we do agree in is in ordering a PC (with a stock intel heatsink no less) for a grand more than what you'd usually pay for it.

Posted 01/16/2009 at 01:37:12am

The storage field is killing it recentley, as if 500gb increases in storage weren't enough, we got 300gb raptors now, io fusion is coming out with a PCI-4x 80gb storage with 800mb/s read, ocz vertex ssds better than intel's and for half the price. Having said that, I think this tech could be a bit late to the party, 1tb/s reads are coming in at least a year or two, and SSDs sound a heck of a lot more dependable, and smaller. Also laser tech sounds very expensive, especially with precision reading that 1tb/s requires, and by that time SSDs will be cheap as chips.

Posted 01/10/2009 at 06:05:36am

What? Are you crazy? Course, it's all going to get all washed out and homogenous after 60 hours, and maybe then you can compare oblivion to fallout 3, but In my opinion, Fallout 3, thank god for this, is nothing like Oblivion. It goes for extreme quality, as opposed to Oblivion's monolithic quantity. Fallout 3 is an actual game, with well-thought out 20-something quests, and slow leveling and slow gear acquisition. Also it has no weapon/armour tiers, which is nice. (Well, it might, but it's not very obvious. Like I said, Fallout 3 is nothing, imho, like Oblivion.

Posted 01/10/2009 at 05:59:25am

If you're interested in thermals, you might be a bit dissapointed, but that comes with the territory with dual-gpu 1slot cards. You can get some ram-heatsinks and stick a whole bunch of em on the backplate, and stick a fan real close, or upgrade to an antec 1200, that thing has amazing airflow. Also, if anybody has the bawls to make a watercooling kit for this baby, you could go with that. But personally, if you can wait, you can get a 4870, OCit a bit, have almost top-notch preformance, in everythin except for Crysis (for which you won't get top-top notch preformance anyways, even with this card), and upgrade to a card for the same price which will be 30-40% better in one year.

Posted 01/08/2009 at 11:46:03pm

And I have gotten seriously sick and tired of NVidia fanboys' blind devotion. Listen bud, I liked NVidia a hell of a lot more than ATI in the last couple of years, but the last gen's GTX280 iteration was terrible, SLI was implemented terrrrribly in all but 3 games (check out xbitlabs.com, GPUs vs Games article), not to mention the really stupid tactic of slapping as much transistors as they can on the PCB and not even caring about efficiency. In the last graphics war the 4870x2 won fair and square, not cause it's one slotted, but cause it was hell of a lot more cost-efficient and better designed. This vid. card is definetley a step in the right direction for Nvidia, but I won't pronounce a clear winner until I see ATI's and Nvidia's next gen. So if you didn't get my point so far, don't state Nvidia as the clear winner matter-of-factly just because you really want Nvidia to win, you just might look stupid.

Posted 01/08/2009 at 11:25:46pm

Doh, I just got myself a 4870x2 :( Course, I got it watercooled, so I make up for it in OC'ing, hehe :)

Posted 01/08/2009 at 11:20:10pm

lol, talking about fanboys. Not saying that a 295 atm isn't a good buy, just saying-take it easy fella.

Posted 01/08/2009 at 09:18:56am

Heh, I suppose its very possible and reasonable to expect the main movie media to be turned over to the internet, however I am positive that Blu-ray will be used for a. Games (for at least another 20 years until clients like steam completley take over) b. external data storage (yes you can use external HDD's, but they're bulky, and hard to carry around) c. things that the DVD is used for now, i.e. Windows OS and other installation discs, and other stuff I can't be bothered to think of.

 On the whole though, it's more than reasonable to expect the whole blu-ray movie ordeal to be moved over to the internet in the next 2-4 years.