Pyrion

And Russians. The Russians are probably the sole redeeming factor of latenight games. It's always fun to hear someone rage in a language you can't make heads or tails of.

There is no merit to your argument because the pyro is doing his fucking job by setting people on fire. The medic's job is to HEAL PEOPLE, that's why he's called a MEDIC, and if he doesn't do his fucking job, then he's only taking up a player spot and wasting everybody's time. Which, incidentally, is what griefing typically entails. Everybody remember this the next time he gets spawncamped, and ignore the person that kills him in such a manner. Even though spawncamping is against the server rules, we should all just stfu and let the spawncamper have his "fun," right guys?

omfg THIS. This effectively summarizes all of my grievances with playing TF2 on pubs. It is when they're taking up valuable player spots and making your job harder than it should be.

Should be, look at his steam community profile stats.

It's only a steamroll mechanic when it comes to ctf matches where the winning team knows wtf they're doing. On the vast majority of pub servers that have alltalk on, it's an equalizer, it lures out the idiots that are aiming for cheap, unearned kills they normally couldn't get, so they can get raped by people that know what they're doing. Much RAGE ensues over alltalk which is just lulz for all. That's why I proposed a 60-sec crit boost back when the variable was first introduced (you know, cuz I'm one of those guys that reads the patch notes when the damn things are released to find out exactly what the hell's been changed), cuz I knew drama and lulz would both ensue, in great quantities. So far I'm not disappointed.

Because we're all harmless geeks that are obsessed with video game music. That's why.

Yeah I responded stream-of-consciousness as well, just reading and typing whatever came to mind as far as responding. I know that a lot of that isn't really absolutely necessary, but I figured I'd put it out there anyways. Anyway, MS didn't force the 64-bit issue because they could technically get away with 32-bit addressing in Vista. The OS would still run. It'd be dogshit slow and compared to Vista x64, but it'd still work. I'm thinking they'll force the issue when 4GB of memory is the minimum recommended amount. What's funny is 32-bit Vista doesn't require signed kernel-mode drivers, whereas 64-bit does. They were originally going to force that issue, until the threat of lawsuits from antivirus vendors nixed it, because guess what, most of those products operated by hooking directly into the Windows kernel, same as most rootkits do, instead of running services with elevated permissions as MS intended.

Took a look at your hardware FAQ (interesting way of plugging it, by effectively calling me an idiot), and I felt there were some things that needed expounding: 2.2.7 (obviously): Inconsistency between "running comfortably" and "preventing it from exploding." Which is it going to be? There's enough documentation online that indicates that the processors will still work just fine even with inadequate cooling, although probably not for very long. 2.4.2: That's a rather conservative estimate for how long it would take a processor to overheat. When I was installing my i7, I didn't have the heatsink properly seated (the mounting setup for the i7's heatsink is a pain in the ass to figure out if you're used to working with AMD designs) and the system wouldn't even get to the BIOS screen before shutting itself off. That is, perhaps, another thing worth mentioning: Intel chips at least have always been designed with safeguards to protect the processor in the event of a cooling fault. I'm sure AMD chips of the last several generations do this as well, but it wasn't always like this, and I distinctly remember a comparison video of now-really-old processors having their heatsinks removed and what happens to the processor as a result. The Intel throttled itself down to a snail's pace, the AMD gave up the pixie dust and blue-screened. 3.2.3: It should be noted that since AMD released the Athlon 64, none of their motherboards have involved the use of a northbridge, it being on-die instead. The Nehalem line also has an on-die northbridge. 3.2.6: This section is incredibly misleading. First off... 3.2.6.2: PCI is a parallel bus, meaning that every device on the bus has to share that 133MB/sec limit. That's why, for example, the SB Live cards (and pretty much everything Creative Labs has released since) caused so much grief, as they tended to dominate the PCI bus. 3.2.6.3: PCI-Express is a serialized bus, meaning that a PCI-Express X1 slot has its own dedicated 250MB/sec line to the CPU. Also worth mentioning, if the X1 slot is open-ended (where the "back" of the slot isn't closed off) you can theoretically plug a X4, X8 or X16 device into it and it will run, albeit at 1X. PCI-Express 1X cards are becoming increasingly common replacements for sound and network cards, for example. 3.2.6.4: Users will have to be mindful of the fact that PCI-Express X8 and PCI-Express X16 share the same slot form-factor. X8 is just an X16 slot with half of its lanes disabled. Reason I mention this is that some motherboards, typically on the cheap side, have multiple X16 slots but only one will actually have full X16 functionality, the rest will be X8 (or sometimes even lower). 3.2.7: This isn't a recent development: parallel ATA drives aren't limited to the speed of the slowest drive in the chain. I agree that they are a pain in the ass, in some ways, but in others they're much less of a pain in the ass. For instance, cable management. SATA cables are so damn small that it's not hard to find them coming dislodged from the drives. Parallel ATA, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass to remove once you get it in. Also maybe get in a mention for SAS? 3.2.8.1: Worth mentioning is that USB is entirely host-based, meaning the reason that USB devices can afford to be so damn small (compared to equivalent PCI/PCI-Express devices, anyway) is that practically everything they do is offloaded to the CPU. So a USB TV tuner, for example, will consume much more CPU cycles to decode a TV signal than a PCI tuner would. Some USB mice (if you ramp up the sampling rate) can consume an inordinate amount of CPU cycles as well. Also, USB host controllers do tend to be flaky, so it's not uncommon to boot a system and find that the keyboard or mouse or other devices aren't showing up. 3.2.8.3: Should mention that if you unplug a PS/2 device while the system is running, you'll have to restart the system for it to be recognized again. 3.2.11.1: You can also use a 20-pin connector on a 24-pin board, although it isn't recommended, as the current draw may be too great for the wiring. Worth to mention, much in the same vein as overclocking, YMMV. 3.4: Must be mentioned: running a server board implies running a server OS. I'm not bullshitting on this. If you try to run anything greater than a dual-processor rig on a client version of Windows, it will not utilize (nor will it even recognize) the additional processors. Client versions of Windows are license-limited to two physical processors. Not physical cores or logical cores, mind you. You can have two eight-core processors and utilize all sixteen cores, although I agree, that's overkill. Also, server boards typically don't have room for as many expansion slots as a desktop board would, so you may be limited to onboard video, or a single PCI-Express slot that won't necessarily be X16. 4.2.1.3: Absolute minimum for Vista is 128MB, and that's just enough for DWM to function. Otherwise, you're stuck in GDI+ rendering, which is ass. 4.2.6.1: Bear in mind that a single-slot card will vent hot air back into the case, which is dumb, because the orientation of the overwhelming majority of computers has the card pointing downwards, meaning it's just going to suck that hot air back in. If you get a single-slot card, you're probably just going to have to get a slot blower fan to expel that air anyway. 4.2.6.5: I don't know if you mention this in your PSU section, as I have yet to read it, but what really matters for video card power requirements is not wattage, it's the number of amps on the +12V rail. More is better. 5.3.1: Beware of Creative Labs cards in Vista. Their drivers are garbage. This is news to nobody, btw. Ahh, I got to your PSU section. Hm. 6.2.3: If your overall power factor is less than the power company's threshold, you will likely be charged extra for the discrepancy. 6.2.9: The problem with a multiple rail setup is that unused power on a rail is wasted power. It doesn't get recovered. Better to get a single large rail than multiple dedicated rails. Also, it's rather hilarious that some PSUs that are marketed as multiple rails actually only have a single large rail anyways when they're taken apart and looked at by people that know wtf they're doing. 6.2.9.3: No mention of the absolute necessity of amps on the +12V rail? Shame. 6.3.8: I had one of these. 500W. Ran fine until I tried SLI, then it couldn't keep up. Not enough amps on the +12V rail. 6.3.9: Are you sure Apevia is NewEgg's brand name? Or at least, their only brand name? ABS comes to mind. 6.3.11: One thing to mention that I appreciate from PCP&C is that they market their PSUs based entirely around efficiency, so their Silencer 750W will actually provide 750W, for example. 6.4.1: This should be explained in the manual you get when you buy one of these, but under no circumstances should you ever connect a laser printer to a UPS. You'll kill the printer and likely damage the UPS as well. Just felt like mentioning that. 6.4.3: I know I'm being pedantic, but these should be more appropriately referred to as "socket multipliers," since that's all they really do. 7.2.2.1: "all ATA drives are essentially limited by the slowest unit on the cable." Uh, no. Look up "independent device timing." Heck, just read the Wikipedia entry on Parallel ATA, it goes into this. 7.2.7: Quite true. Disabling NCQ, when you can actually do it, results in a net increase in read and write speeds from the drive because it doesn't have to waste time queuing up requests and sorting them for the sake of seek efficiency. 7.3.2: Seagate went from good to questionable when they defied logic by buying out Maxtor. 8.2.1.9: I seem to recall the early Pentium 4's used RDRAM, which was hilarious cuz the latency was horrible. 8.2.1.12: Ah! My favorite subject (even before PSU +12V amperage)! Worth mentioning that if you're running a 32-bit program in 64-bit windows, and it isn't compiled/"flagged" as large address-aware, 64-bit Windows will still limit it to that 1.86GB chunk. A good example for triggering this is old versions of Supreme Commander, as this is heavily documented. GPG even went so far as to compile newer versions (including the Forged Alliance expansion) as large address-aware so that this ceased to be an issue. You can force the issue however, at least with some applications, by using a Visual Studio commandline tool called "editbin" (which is crap) or "LaaTiDo" (google it, I'm too lazy to format this for the forum) to re-flag an application as large address-aware (but this will break any content protection built in that does a CRC check on the file, so for instance Microsoft Games for Windows Live won't run on Fallout 3 if you rig it to run as large address-aware). 8.2.5/8.2.5.1: As far as the i7's are concerned, your vTT and vDIMM have to be within 0.5v of eachother to avoid damaging the CPU. That's the word of God, at least as far as Intel is concerned. In practice, you can go beyond this, but it's advisable not to, as processors have been killed in the line of duty/experimentation. One thing to bear in mind though, is that the voltage you specify and the voltage you get are often two entirely different things. eVGA, for instance, has put voltage sensor points on their boards so you can hook up a multimeter and check them yourself, if you're so inclined. 8.5: 64-bit editions of Windows require twice as much as 32-bit, because the word sizes are twice as long. So Vista x64 requires 2GB minimum (but if you're going to run x64 in this day and age, this shouldn't be a problem in the first place since you'll start out with at least 4GB and hit the current ceiling of 12GB). 11.3.2: Thing to bear in mind is that aluminum oxidizes, so you might not want to buy an aluminum case if you live in a region that experiences high humidity, or if you live along a coastline. Also, being really light means aluminum is flimsier than steel, which could be an issue with some cases built to save on overall weight for, say, hauling the rig to a LAN party. 11.6.2: They weren't always this way. I had a Lian-Li server case that didn't have beveled edges, and sliced my right pinky finger open down to the tendon while trying to pry the front cover off of a drive bay. Just felt like mentioning that. I still have the scar. Would you believe I spent about two hours typing all that? *yawns* EDIT: That's not a glitch. That was done on purpose, because they got a lot of complaints from idiots that had 4GB installed and it didn't say they had 4GB, but instead showed how much they could actually use!

CheaterStrike. I'm not kidding.

Mind you guys, the colo option costs a lot up-front to build the actual rig, but the bandwidth and site rental costs are piddly when you compare just how much you can run (basically the limits of the rig you build and the bandwidth available on-site) to paying for each server separately. For the sake of comparison, what my clan does now would cost well over $300 a month that, after the cost of building the box is concerned, is about $80 a month. Two TF2 servers (one pub, one private), one L4D server, Ventrilo and Mumble servers (I think those are separate, so that's where a good chunk of the monthly cost goes anyways). I'd have to check with my clanmates responsible for this as to where they got their colo and how much it costs for that option per month, but it can't be more than about $50 a month after the cost of building the box. Course, you basically do your own tech support, so someone would have to be fluent in remote administration.

Yeah I'm betting there's a hidden autorun.inf in the root directory screwing things up. As a matter of principle tho, you should just turn autorun off.

I'm taking a class on it, so in that regard I "use" it, but only in virtual machines here. I'm half-tempted to install Kubuntu on my laptop though, after trying it out in a VM. Really slick UI.

Yeah, I seem to recall prior to djp cleaning house, when Protricity was an op, that the irc channel was hostile towards practically everyone, myself included. Big fucking deal, serious business and all that.

The 9800GTX's gimmick isn't even specific to that GPU. Everything nVidia makes from the GeForce 8 line up does onboard PhysX. The problem is that there just aren't that many games that support PhysX in the first place. Single applications no, but the computer as a whole would benefit from two additional cores. I mean, it's not like every other process sitting in the background behaves itself and doesn't consume CPU cycles. It isn't how many +12V rails they have, it's how many amps are on the +12V rail in the first place. For most PCI-Express graphics cards, you want at least 28A per card. Honestly? Get an eATX case if you can afford it. You simply have a whole lot more room to work with. The standard ATX mid-towers that are a dime a dozen on NewEgg are a pain in the ass to get everything fitting in perfectly, especially those with the front-loading 3.5" slots for hard drives, cuz the cables almost always have to be routed around or behind the video card. Even better if you get a case that has the power supply at the bottom, instead of the top, so that the poor thing doesn't overheat by cooling itself with hot air from your CPU. If you're only shopping for one DVD drive, then yeah, but I'm of the opinion that you should only be using a burner for actually burning discs, so as to not wear the thing out with regular disc reads. Get a DVD-ROM drive for that. What, because you don't like Vista? I mean you recommend getting 4GB of RAM, and then you recommend XP, which we all know means XP Professional 32-bit and not XP Professional x64 edition cuz that one's got practically no driver support. What's the point of recommending 4 gigs of memory (or more, "up to what your board supports") if he's just going to come back and complain that his system's only seeing about 3.5 gigs, if at that?

It would take me a month tops.

Funny how you're all only noticing this NOW. I complained about him sticky spawn camping months ago and nobody did anything about it then except to tell me to "stop whining." Even funnier: last time I checked, I'm still an admin, but I'm looking for consensus on this before I act on my impulses to hop on there (for once) and ban a regular.

No they weren't. They've been this cheap for at least the past 4 years. You just had to know where to look.

That's cuz Tagan is owned by the same parent company as NewEgg.

It almost looks like you've got enough parts for TWO computers on that wishlist. Seriously, clear some of that wishlist out, it's confusing commenting on what you're thinking of buying if you have multiple items covering the same thing on it. Two motherboards, two power supplies, WTF? Oh, as for power supplies, I have one of these.

Stardock has Impulse. It's even less invasive than Steam, you can log on from multiple computers simultaneously (and you don't need to be logged on to play the games) without them bitching at you for it. What the hell are you talking about?

I'm thinking bad RAM because it's consistent. A failing hard drive would be noticeable either due to noise emitted, bad sectors popping up all over the place, or never getting past POST. I dunno about dying motherboards though, it's certainly possible, but I would think something like that would just fail to start up altogether, since there are so many things that can go wrong that would produce a POST error.

I bet Bahamut's never played on a 32-player low-grav instant-respawn 2fort server before. When everybody is out in the middle shooting at eachother, yeah, even two 8800GT's in SLI will have trouble rendering all of that.

Yes, I could, but I'm not particularly fond of dipping below 20 FPS in loaded firefights.

1600x1200, 4xAA, 16xAF, everything set to high. 2 8800GT's in SLI if anyone's wondering.

...and yet you still can't avoid trains. btw what video card did you get?