=VG= SemlerPDX

Upgrade the current PC or buy a new one? What to choose....Been there, done that. Let me ease your mind and tell you that in this case, "throwing money" at the problem will help - to a degree, before you have to buy a whole new PC. So many of us remember a time when we first bought our computer, and lo and behold, it can play FPS games online! And with a decent ~25-35 frames per second! !2cool Then, some time later it just doesn't keep up with the new games, patches to old games, or whatever. Upgrading to a new PC will solve this problem, but small things still help, too. I know a few people who just recently reset their PC's (backup, re-install Windows, transfer back the backup) and BAM! !yahoo Back to the way it ran when first purchased. Always try this first. Crap builds up, digital and physical. A dust cleanup and re-install works wonders! And even small upgrades like the right video card, better cooling and dust control, or even faster hard drive(s) make a world of difference in our area of PC use. Keep in mind that few (current) games can fully take advantage of high amounts of RAM, or fully utilize more than a few processing cores. I can't say which CRASH or tech problem when playing bugs me most, cuz they just don't happen so much anymore, and I didn't spend a fortune to achieve it. Just a few parts in the right place. Just remember as you upgrade, be aware of performance bottlenecks. What good is the best processor if the hard drive(s) and RAM can't get the information to it at fast as the new CPU itself could operate? Or why more RAM when the old CPU couldn't handle data that fast anyway? !gamer My recipe for a good gaming experience: 1. Fast HDD or RAID for OS and/or Programs; maybe secondary drives for programs to run on. Simultaneous reads/writes from separate OS drive and Program drive = speed! 2. A little more RAM than needed for the game + the OS -Win7, give it 2GB RAM; for a big game, give it another 2GB RAM (so, you'll need a killer 32-bit sys with 4GB RAM, or 64-bit sys with at least 6-8GB of (ANY SPEED) DDR3 RAM. Anything else is overkill, except for upcoming titles, or ArmA2:OA.) 3. A Dual or Quad core (even pre-icore) processor -only for max Arma settings or maybe the upcoming BF3 will you truly need nex-gen processors for a great visual game. In Battlefield 2: Project Reality, a decent 2-4 core processor will never be your bottleneck. 4. A way to keep dust from piling up on RAM, FSB & CPU heatsinks, and Video card heatsinks. Perhaps HDD mounts right behind the main fan intake (nearly a standard now). You can really increase your PC health and even get more consistant speed with a non-stock case, one with good air-flow and filters you can simply vacuum from time to time. 5. IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT INTERNET CONNECTION: I called my internet service provider and asked why everyone has a DOCSYS-3 modem and I still have DOCSYS-2, paying the same price? They upgraded me for free, and at the same time, I chose to jump from the 8meg plan to 22meg plan - this could be part of it...I am always ALWAYS the first to be able to make a squad in PR on new map loads now.. !cmdo ..$25 more per month than basic internet so you get better connection to your favorite game? Is it worth it? I think so...we mostly all play all the time! !gam You're a gamer, admit it! So pay a tad more, if you can afford it, for true gaming speeds. 6. Manage those ports! Make sure your gaming PC (via MAC address or IP Ports) has PRIORITY over every other PC that connects through the WiFi router, and subsequently, the Modem itself. This way, no one downloading anything at the house will interfere with your online connection to the game. *Had to scour tech forums to learn how, and talk to Comcast tech support guys (the good ones); !lazy Yeah...it sucked...Couple of key words: QoS Packet Scheduling, UPnP, Port Forwarding/Triggering; but all hardware is different! 7. Video cards are not always what they seem! The card in the picture is an "ATI Radeon 5750", and sounds good 'till you look at it. I don't care if it says it has a 5700 series GPU or 1GB of "RAM" -- this is NOT what gamers refer to as a video card. It depends on SHARED RAM as well as it's onboard "1GB" of so-called VRAM. This is why NO gaming laptop can compare to a desktop running the same version GPU on a REAL graphics card, well before the case/heat issues come up in the argument. Not sure how they get away with that, but there are 3-4 "ballparks" that REAL video cards fall into. They are the $100-200 range, the $200-300 range, and the $300-750+ ranges. Place your money into a big brand-name card in one of these ranges for price vs. performance satisfaction. Names like Diamond, or Asus because BRAND NAMES MATTER with video cards! If you have room and power, use 2 less expensive cards in SLI/Crossfire instead of one VERY hot & fast ($400+) card. Also, don't worry about minor differences in the cards specs - new versions of cards come out on a MONTHLY basis, way too hard to keep up when trying to comparing one to another of the same price range/type. 8. FINALLY, if everything is perfect, and you still want more, get a good monitor with 120Hz Refresh Rate. These are the "3D" capable monitors cuz they sync 60 refreshes to each eye with the additional $200 3D glasses. But WITHOUT the glasses, both eyes see 120 refreshes per second and it LOOKS SMOOTH AS GRAVY!! !cool These monitors are in the $275-$350 price range to start, and I wish I could afford one!! Hope this helps someone, I know it would have helped me before all that time spent reading and messing around. If you can, off-load sound and NIC (internet) to a PCI(-e) card(s). Less for the MB/Primary CPU to deal with. These give minor 5-10 FPS increases, respectively. Good Luck!!

Have a blast, bro!

You gonna fix that link, Bones?

Cache in Sadif Ab, NE of Rasman Airport, kept blowing up after we set it off. Was BAF, server had been up 140 minutes, 2 caches were blown prior to that. Server FPS 16. The secondary explosions kept going over and over. Didn't end, so I restarted server. Not sure if it was hack or script problem. Witnesses were .:frosty:. and FarFarLars.

"You Have Zero Friends" South Park - "Dad, it's just a stupid button that takes like 3 seconds to press. It doesn't mean anything!" "So...what? You don't have the 3 seconds? Or..."

I'm back, and beat. Lotta running around, setting up. Then, I thought I'd hike around to some familiar spots. I didn't expect to do that, just staying over night, and wanting to waterproof my boots, I did not bring them. Not easy on the body hiking off-path in Vans. The most exciting part of the trip was the wind storm mid-day that felled a tree about 50 yards from the camp. Crap was falling everywhere, and all of a sudden, I hear a huge snap and see this giant, 6ft-round tree fall along the back path leading upstream. It hit the ground with a thump I could feel in my feet, bounced into 3 pieces and hit the ground again. It settled right over "Tom Thumb's Cabin"; a small, moss-covered hole that looks like a hobbit house or something with a baby tree growing out of it's roof. It was spared from being crushed by the 80ft long, rotten tree falling. I had no battery left in my camera at that time, but I will photo it next trip. Downstream: Upstream: Fire-bellied Salamandar:

Actually, it's a little pre-season, but Cousin John is heading up camping for the summer. He's a tough old mountain lion, and used to be a camp host for Thousand Trails many a summer. Now, retired, he likes to spend the entire season up in the same valleys with his dog, Roxie. I run him up blocks of ice and any supplies he asks for every 5 days. That starts today, and the weather is just beautiful for setting up! Here's hoping we find enough dry wood to build a fire. Always easier to burn wet wood on a hot fire. Here's a few pictures of what it looks like this time of year: And here's the river, high and fast:

The USA Ins Server name reads TS3 Port 9887

You're all doing something right; This room is seldom empty, and often there is a wait to join for many players. Server is now the 5th most popular ArmA II server! s/f

Arma II, mostly Falcon 4 when I get rolling again. PR not so much anymore, but would possibly be into events.

Amen Angels in flesh-colored suits.

Awesome, Solar! I hardly know ye! Maybe we can cap some townships and blow up some weapons cache's now. (or soon, as it were) !eatmyuzi

thanks!

I love ArcadeFunhouse! So does my laptop! !gamer This one's more of a strategy game. Bloons Tower Defense 4 http://arcadefunhouse.com/other/bloons-tower-defense-4/ Gotta set up defenses to pop bloons before they reach the end of the maze. Big bloons pop into several smaller ones, which pop into several smaller ones, and so on. Popped bloons = cash to buy more emplacements after each round. Continued play unlocks better emplacements, and every emplacement can be enhanced (with cash) to become the best it can be throughout the game. It took more than 6 mortars to get me past level 87 on EASY, but I pulled it off in the second screenshot. Here, there are hundreds of bloons marching straight for the exit, and my lone SuperMonkey hasn't a monkey-turd's chance in hell of stopping them: Once you unlock all the upgrades and special emplacements, you just gotta try to fill the map with them. The mortars can be directed, one at a time, though: I've made it pretty far, and MEDIUM difficulty is even more challenging as items and upgrades cost more and bloon waves are much more intense. BTW, once you make it to level 100, it's time to put down the laptop and load the game up on a real gaming PC. That's a serious amount of sprites!

It's really all about performance bottlenecks. Like you said, there are few softwares out that could possibly utilize 50% of that particular i7. The true beauty of all the i7's is they have the best performance per overclock of any CPU ever made, and the right i7 boards support tri-channel RAM. That's 50% increase over all other RAM buses because of the "cap" that seems to have been reached in the FSB/Memory Clock speeds. Only way to improve is to expand laterally, to more channels of RAM. So there's another entire reason to go with an i series setup, but you don't need than near "server grade" edition. Check this one out, it's a $300 model and I don't think any game(out this year or next) could utilize 100% of it's potential overclocked or not: Intel i7 950 Pair it with the Asus SaberTooth X58 and 12GB of ViperXtreme (s/n 6461732). All three have the same 1333MHz FSB clock, and await only a nice SSD RAID array and maybe an Asus ENG TX480, if you can keep it cold enough that is! The Patriot Inferno SSD 120GB's are around $270, but are THE fastest SSD's available, or were less than 6 months ago. They can fully take advantage of the 6Gb/sec transfer rate allowed by the SaberTooth. If you do go this (expensive) route, talking to everyone now, make sure you got a good UPS like the BX1300G. Hope that helps! Good luck, bro! !rockon

Thanks, guys! Yeah, super sense of accomplishment! The 6770 has a stock clocked GPU @ 900MHz & Memory @ 1010MHz; I've got her purring at 940MHz GPU and 1310MHz Memory Clock. Course, Prime95 and Everest are no benchmarkers compared to ArmA:OA and GTA4(PC). It plays ArmA at a very solid 57 FPS avg. on high settings, 1600x900 resolution. GTA4, I can set everything to max except daytime shadows and I get a solid 45 FPS. It's not technically bare-bones, but damn near close. That is the stock Pegatron mainboard from the e9120y, as well as the DDR3, and Phenom II X4.

(I guess I should have got an Evo like Tortia, these cell phone pictures suck!) The stock case is tiny, cramped with wires, and runs too hot to game even in winter. That's a small eyeglasses screwdriver sitting in it for comparison: I picked the Thermaltake Black Widow mid-tower for it's size and filtered cooling: Filtered Front Panel: Filtered Front Main Intake Fan: And Filtered Power Supply Intake: Old heatsink and crappy fan replaced with Thermaltake Black Widow heatsink - I use Artic Silver Ceramique for it's fast, 25-hour cure time: The included fan speed control had a 2-inch wire, so I used a longer one so I could drill a hole & mount it nicely on the rear panel: If the Phenom II X4 processor is the brains of a game PC, the graphics card is the heart: It's gotta have a bigger power supply, too. The Corsair Gaming Series 600W PSU has blue LED's, so you know it can power this card: (lol) Just enough air-flow room for a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme: (still can't set PR to Ultra High audio, though) They put in all that effort to filter the front intakes, but this gigantic side-panel fan blows directly onto the mainboard and everything !shok I've since added a cellulose filter to it: The Black Widow is built! Win7 in RAID-0 on 2 500GB 7200RPM 16MB buffered Drives, the old 7200 drive slaved as a 12GB Paging File drive and archive backup drive. With 4 cores and 8GB of DDR3, this thing eats games like ArmA and GTA4(PC) for breakfast at high settings:

Funny #$$ $###! Love the sock stash cash! !lol That's some real $###, too. I lived in the ghetto before, for many years. Not quite as ghetto as South Central, but I fought for my life twice in that time. I stood out like white on rice on a paper plate in a snow storm. My few friends are life long, the kind that cover your back for reals; and have. !pals Can't sugar coat it; it's a hard, fast paced place & a lot of people there only have one or two things on their mind at any given time, three tops - as long as you ain't one of `em! It sure as hell ain't gonna be about nothin more than 4 miles away!!

I see a mossberg too, and it's a lot more pimp than mine. I'd expect nothing less from the Sarge. That a 22" barrel? Gotta imagine that's no Bushmaster M4 - Can't see the receiver close enough but I'd bet it's a Colt, Outlanders. Price difference between Colt and the imitators is about a thousand bucks. Boss case, man!!! There are few I'd rather have on my side in the coming post-apocolyptic Zombieland. Semper Fi

Thank you! As you can imagine, I'm out of my mind and not thinking so well.

Happy as hell with my new case, and the few parts that make this new game PC purr like a Ferrari, I've screwed up and lost access to my 1TB backup drive that has, oh, everything I've saved or made in 5+ years!!!!!!!! (apparently, pride doth indeed cometh before the fall...eth) !rr Will be a while and a lotta $$$ before I get my data back. Is there any way to retrieve my "online profile" =VG= SemlerPDX for Project Reality/Battlefield 2? I remember my password and all...but lost all the config files that go with it, of course. !help

Watch these videos, they will get you airborne in no time flat! They follow the Falcon 4 manual's Training Missions and the in game flyable Training Missions: http://www.youtube.com/user/UngamerEye#p/c/23F83E7ABD8FE7CE/1/q9YF9ENxdDE !cp

This is the "ramp start trainer" in flash player format. See what it's like to flip the switches and bring this falcon to life. Falcon 4 is true to life in every non-classified system and can be as rewarding to learn as it is daunting. Flash programs aren't allowed via attachment, so I have made a 1 file RAR that includes only the sp3-ramp-start-trainer flash program. sp3_ramp_start_trainer-flash.rar

Why are all you gamers going for these $2000 "gaming" laptops?!?! Heat is an issue - we are "not there yet" and I don't care how Alienware wants to pimp it. $2K could buy or build a sick PC, bro!!! Yes, you will play games great on it. So why then do we still build towers with lots of cooling and large dedicated graphics cards? Trust me, it is not because portability isn't an issue...LAN parties are big now. But for that price, you can have a standard PC that TWICE overpowers any MX laptop. Here's one of the many portable PC cases out there just for example:

Truly a thing of beauty!