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. 

Widescreen is superior for work (obviously) but not necessarily good for games. It all depends what games you play I guess. Most newer games do support it and I'm sure in many games it's a nice feature to have.

I personally don't want to buy a widescreen monitor for home right now simply because some of the games I still play (Quake, Diablo 2, etc) don't natively support widescreen, so I'm left with the choice of stretching the image and breaking the aspect ratio (unacceptable to me) or having the borders on the edges.

If you have an Nvidia card your drivers can automatically do this (have 4:3 images centered or letterboxed), but if you're an ATI user then I find this feature is absent or doesn't work: e.g. on this 24" widescreen at work, I have to go into the monitor's clunky menu and tell it to maintain the aspect ratio of the image every time I load a game and want a 4:3 resolution. At least this monitor has that option, some don't, so you'd be fucked in that case.

Plus, using a large widescreen resolution is obviously going to make your video card work harder, which might slow your framerate unless you have a $600 video card, which I don't. 

Naturally if you don't need or want widescreen for whatever reason, having 2 monitors instead can kinda give you the best of both worlds, and might only cost the same price as a widescreen monitor would anyway (could even be cheaper). Sometimes it's better (having 2 monitors) and in some situations having the extra room on one monitor can be better also, it really depends what applications you use I guess.

I have a dual 4:3 monitor setup at home and find it's good for games and work. Occasionally I do wish I had the extra room that a widescreen monitor provides, but usually the 2 monitors are sufficient.

I have one of those 24" Dell widescreens at work along with a 19" 4:3. I have to say that I don't often use the 2nd monitor as the primary is big enough for work stuff in most cases. I don't like the widescreen monitor for games though, for the reasons outlined in the previous post - I still choose 4:3 most often even when the game supports widescreen, and it's a pain to get it to preserve the aspect ratio on an ATI card. 

i still have one, in fact i got a new one on the 2nd week of december. its one of those huge apple studio display monitors (21") (for it got $25! haha).

i like crt monitors much better than lcd ones. i havent seen one in a store (except for those damn apple ones) that make me happy. maybe its the store lighting? i dont know. but i havent seen one that looks good yet. but its weird, because the screen on almost any notebook looks great to me. :)

i do crave the madness of widescreen monitors though, but until i find one that makes me happy, i don't think i'll get one so soon. 

(for it got $25! haha). --> hehe, sound so dumb. i meant to write "got it for $25" but yeah. :)

anyway... 

I think tube monitors are always going to look better. I have one at home (not because I wanted one particularly, but because it was given) and I think you get a better picture. Because the monitor also acts as a light source, the picture is always gonna look brighter!

At work Im using a 21 inch Xerox LCD (4:3) and a HP w1907v, which is a fairly large widescreen LCD, both of which give a satisfactory picture, I play games on the Xerox all the time, and it gives a great picture for Quake!!

For me the biggest attraction of an LCD monitor is that they save space, and use less power (I think). The space saving factor is a big one! A 21inch tube screen is gonna take up a hell of a lot of room!

Hah! If youve got $300 (dollars, Necros?) you wont quite have enough money to just go out and buy a HDTV!! Which is a shame! You could get a 32inch LCD HDTV for about £300 (pounds) over here, if you look in the right places, and they all seem to have PC connectivity! 

Budget of about �600

Ive been looking at the Dell XPS systems, with Quad-core processor (2.4Ghz?) and a 256Mb NVidia 8600 GTS...

Any other suggestions? 

...I could get a 8800 GT 512Mb...

? :-o