Yeah actually a simple chkdsk seems to have 'fixed' the problem, but only up to a certain point, I'm still getting the weird random reboot, guess my main hard drive must be fucked for good, will have to look into reinstalling windows on a clean on. Thanks for your suggestions!

While this topic is active, do people here recommend switching to 64bit and Vista anytime soon? Was listening to some coders at work, and DX10 seemed to be worth the trouble of using Vista... 

If you haven't already, you could run a check on your system memory too with e.g. memtest86(+), sporadic parity errors in RAM can cause weird symptoms. 

Is it supposed to make somebody laugh ? 

Finally figured out what that loud pop noise was... one of the capacitors in my Antec Neo Power 480 Watt PSU exploded. -_-

i suppose it was mostly my fault... i was a little short on power-- probably running right at the limit, anyway.

dunno if this info will be useful to anyone... :P 

settled on a corsair hx620watt. it's even quieter than the antec was (in fact, i really only hear the case fans now), and the kit was very comprehensive.
i was watching the voltage for a bit, and they are rock solid.

i'd recommend it to anyone who's got more than a couple HDDs and a highend video card (or 2). 

you overloaded a 480 watt psu? o_O 

that's very doable 

Hate to say a dirty word, but has anyone tried switching to using a Mac+boot camp for gaming/mapping at all? How has your experience been? Compatibility ok?

XP is ok, but unless MS pull out some radical service pack for Vista, I don't think I'm going to want to go down that road. Also, all the drivers for NVidia and ATi cards seem to be shite lately, so maybe there is a chance performance could be better on Macs. Do graphics drivers etc. get updated often on the Mac like they do on PC? 

Speaking of power supplies... I'm a little worried bout mine. I just added my 3rd hard disk - plus 2 CD's makes 5 disk drives (4 ATA, 1 SATA). Other stuff is a socket 754 90nm sempron (62W/1.4V) + athlonXP fan, FX5600 + Zallman VF900-Cu fan @ 1400rpm, two DDR400 simms and a PCI sound card. My Power supply is an so/so brand 350W. Is this ok. Seems to be fine, but i dunno much about power supplies. The BIOS reports the 3.3 and 12V lines are ok. I'm thinking of getting a silent power supply upgrade though, but do i need to ? 

is an 8600GT better/faster than a 7900GT (what I currently have)?

asking here because I cant seem to get a straight answer of google. 

horray! 

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html

erk 

I knew it was too cheap to be true :) 

the 8600gt is absolute balls. The 8800gt on the other hand though, wow. 

also, on the subject of nVidia's recent inability to name their cards properly, they're currently replacing the 8800 series... their naming scheme goes GT, GTS, GTX, Ultra in ascending order, but they're replacing the cards one by one with faster cards with the same name starting at the bottom.

So a month ago the 8800gt was released, which was almost twice as fast as the old GTS (which was supposed to be faster). A week ago they released the new GTS, which is much faster than the old one, so the new GTS is about as fast as the old GTX (which costs a lot more). It's such a huge mess, and if you aren't following graphics cards that closely, you could easily end up paying double what you need, without any performance benefits. 

name it with the exact same name? It's not as if they're running out of numbers or alphabet?

Same with Nokia. 6110 is an all time classic, perhaps the best mobile phone ever made for just phone use. Many people still have a working model (or the cheaper sister model 5110). And the idiots released some GPS gizmo with the same 6110 model number this year or was it 2006.

Marketing... 

Marketing gone mad.

It's an absolute joke when you can't even determine which is the better card without looking at an online guide. You can't even use price as an indicator, since stores will often try to keep selling older, superseded models at a higher price than newer, better cards (so they don't make a loss on the stock I guess).

It's particularly frustrating when they often put out gimped or crippled cards with very similar names to the better cards.

Nvidia really piss me off these days with their naming scheme. It's one of the reasons that the last card I bought was an ATI :)

They too (ATI) had gone a bit funny with their names (though usually the number of X's in the card's name indicated how macho it was). The good news is, they've decided to start being sensible again with their newer range of cards.

Here's the 2 new ATI cards:

HD3850
HD3870

Guess what? The one with the bigger number is the better card. I shit you not. No X's, no pro, no GT/S/X/MX/BOLLOX.

So we can all rejoice, for the return of common sense is nigh! 

can a 7900GT and 7900GTX work together in SLI mode or do you have to have two of the same cards? 

They used to recommend you used cards that were identical in every way (including the manufacturer). I think they've relaxed the restrictions a bit, but I'd be very surprised if you could mix cards with different chipsets. 

using 2 different cards (even if the only difference is GT - GTX) is asking for trouble really.

If your still wondering though, i'm sure any pc technology forum can help you out further. 

I'll look into it but sounds like another "feature". 

I'm toying with the idea of getting some computers together to do some parallel computing. A beowulf cluster, basically. I figure that I just need a couple of motherboards, dual core processors, one or two gigabit ethernet cards per motherboard, and 2gb of ram per motherboard. I'd like to do it for as cheap as possible... any suggestions on what combinations of parts look the most affordable? 

seeing flickers and such along with 'tink' noises from inside of it.

so i'm finally caving and want to get an LCD display.

anyone have any suggestions? I'd like as big as possible, but it has to fit within i'd say 24" wide. widescreen is ok, but 4:3 (ie: like a crt) is prefered unless there's a good reason for widescreen.

it would be used for work and gaming. i've been told that 'ghosting' effect isn't a big problem anymore for lcds, refresh rates are in the 2ms and not retardedly expensive anymore, apparently?

any one have any suggestions for something less than 300$ (or only a bit over) CDN? 

I have a 19" widescreen lcd with a 8ms response time and I cannot see any ghosting effects at all, so anything less than 8 would be perfect imo.

And I would reconsider about not wanting a widescreen, pretty much all games support widescreen mode these days and I really prefer the viewable area over 4:3 any day.

As for makes and models, I can easily recommend anything by LG, I have had 2 crt's and 2 lcds from LG and they have all been perfect and had great features. 

You're still on a CRT? Anyone else still in the stone age?

I'll echo Daz's comment - I've seen ghosting and stuff on older LCD monitors, but on my 8ms monitor at home, it isn't a noticeable problem. Having said that, I find that I need to turn VSYNC on or it looks bad and hurts my eyes, whereas I didn't have to do that on CRT monitors.

You'll find that most LCD monitors have a refresh rate of 60hz though (don't worry, this doesn't look crap like 60hz on a CRT) so when you've got VSYNC on, you're capped to 60fps. Most people won't care, but if you want that faithful Quake experience, get a model that can do 75hz refresh (so you can reach the default max 72 fps for Quake). I have one of these, so they are available - check the tech specs.

Basically the only reason I can see these days to own a CRT is if you're one of those guys who feels the need to have vsync off and get 320 fps in Quake and such. There really isn't any other reason I can think of to buy a CRT at this point.

The prices have definitely fallen pretty dramatically and the LCD monitors are very affordable now. All of the other initial pitfalls (bad contrast ratio, colour reproduction, noticeable latency, price etc) are all much improved on new LCD monitors and aren't really a problem anymore.