Thats almost exactly the same rig as I would buy!

Have you got a nice Air cooler? For overclocking your CPU to >4Ghz??? Should be fairly easy with that motherboard.

I wouldnt bother with the 8800. I tried putting one in my rig as a dedicated PhysX card, but it was really just a pain in the neck to get the drivers working properly, and then it turned out that for the game I wanted to use the PhysX stuff, it was impossible to use both cards (Metro 2033).

The Radeon 5850 is a seriously speedy card, I would know, I have one!!! I was thinking of buying another, but since all of the games I play run maxed out, there would really be no point.

RAM thing: The socket 1366 motherboards are deigned for using DDR3 RAM in TRIPLE CHANNEL mode, which means you're gonna need 3 DIMMS instead of two. I would buy a nice 6Gb kit (3x2Gb) instead of crippling the motherboard by forcing it to work in dual-channel mode.

:D 

The thing about 2 video cards working in tandem is that they should both be the same card - and they definitely should both be either Nvidia or ATI, but not cross-brand baloney (balogna gives me a spelling error, weird.) The HD5850 is pretty rock solid, so you shouldn't need 2, but if you plan on getting a 2nd one, make sure your mobo supports Crossfire, and you might want to double/triple check that you'll have the space in your case to support both cards. 

The 5850 will slaughter anything released now and even within the next couple of years I'd imagine. As Zwiffle says, if you're doing any kind of Crossfire or SLI thing with multiple cards, they must be the same make and model and almost everybody says it's usually better to get the best single card you can afford anyway.

Almost all video cards come with dual DVI or at the very least a 2nd VGA connector. In other words any card you could buy would support 2 monitors anyway. You only need more cards if you want to do some kind of whacky triple or quadruple monitor setup. 

if that's the case, i'd most definitely drop the the extra video card in favour of more ram. i've found with 3gb of ram, i'm quite often running low and need to step down game settings. remember that w7 is a modern os and requires a lot of memory to function.
with 6g, you'd probably be set on ram for a good long while. 

Yeah, don't get stuck in the hole I am in atm, 2 ram slots on my motherboard died (its 5 years old) so now im running win7 on 1gb of memory :P

To be fair, stuff still works, but it can take an age to do things. Go for the 6b matched set of sticks, there are some nice deals around from the top manufacturers! 

sweet, thanks guys! definitely won't bother with 2 video cards then, and i'll get the triple memory pack.

i'm always behind in gaming anyway - it'll probably be another few years before i actually catch up and start playing the 2010 releases, by which time this one will be ancient.

i can finally play hl2 and quake4 maxed out though yay 

Crysis Warhead maxed out too.

Also the Radeon 5850 overclocks really well, infact the Catalyst Control Center that comes with the ATI drivers allows you to raise the core clock speed a bit, out of the box.
You can use "AMD GPU Clock Tool", (a different free util) to really overclock them. And they can take like 15-20% without breaking a sweat.

Also:

Borderlands is really very very cool. Far too addictive, and a lot more playable than I thought it was gonna be. The way that Co-op play works is really cool too - basically you just "invite" friends to join your singleplayer mission. All XP earned and items picked up whilst playing in your game, they get to keep. Character development works really well here too, seems to be endless leveling up. Even the AI is good. 

Rather than the hardware thread http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=21824&start=626

...and my saga of trying play (or actually now avoid) other PC games continues:

Blizzard non-customer non-support:

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, we will be unable to provide you with a refund for your StarCraft II license.

Any queries, please contact:

Legal Department
Blizzard Entertainment Europe
Billing Support
TSA 60 001
78143 Velizy Villacoublay Cedex
France



Shambler:

That is not acceptable. I have not taken possession of the game (I only
managed to download 200 meg before finding the Battlenet Downloader utterly
intolerable). I paid the full price for the game before finding out it was
unsuitable to get it via Battlenet. I do not expect to have to jump through
hoops and be writing to people in France to have a perfectly normal action
of returning a game and getting a refund.

Given that Blizzard is very familiar with online gaming, there must be some
simple way to delete my account, cancel my download (and prevent any
attempts to re-download it via that purchase) and refund my money.

If whomever this email reaches is unable to deal with this issue, please
pass it on to your superior and get them to call me on 0********** or
0*********. I expect to receive proper customer service from Customer
Service, and my chance of being a Blizzard customer ever again (including
buying a physical copy of SC2 as I had previously intended) depends on that.

Is there any other area of a media purchase industry that takes this attitude to refunds?? If so, I haven't encountered it in my life previously. 

Prostitution, maybe. But then you probably never ask for refunds from your prostitute. 

Isn't regulated at all, so a lot of the time the providers will just shit on the customer if it suits them. It usually does.

I can condense what their reply was into something more honest:

'This is our policy so fuck off, you're not getting anything. If you think you're big and clever enough try fighting with our legal team in France.'

I suspect the phone number will have you jump through more hoops until you can find an English speaker who will basically reword the above and invite you to declare a civil action (whilst making a slam dunk action).

I had a similar experience with Steam recently. 

I might make a huge and previously highly undesirable break from tradition, and make my next downloadable content something I don't actually pay for.... 

That's a shame Shamb :( I've never used the blizzard downloader for anything besides WoW patches so I can't really comment on it.

is it not possible to leave the download running overnight or something while you are not using the pc? if it works the same as the WoW patcher you should be able to stop and start the download process without having to start from the beginning again every time. 

Are the execs either idiots, or is the intention to criminalise and alienate their customer base.

Stupid question. 

i think i'll stick to circular plastic discs for now. o.o 

Well....consistent with the quality of my experience trying to get this game, when I stop the downloader and restart it, it claims it can't continue as the download is not authorised, and I have to go to the Battlenet site to log in (or rather discover that obviously I'm still logged in so the fuckign download IS authorised) and start from there, albeit at the same place (200meg / 7gig before I gave up).

Anyway due to how appalling there customer service is (I think I was trying to get this sorted for 2 hours on Tue evening), there is no way in hell I want the game, I want my money back. Where's my money mother fucker??

IF I'd phoned up customer service, got in a queue for 10 mins, and they'd sorted out it as you'd expect any decent company to do, then I'd have gone out and bought the game on disc that evening.... 

StarCrud 2, is it? 

More like Bordomlands. The graphic style is cool but the game lacks atmosphere. It's like driving through samey liveless wastelands levels doing seemingly pointless quests for random NPCs and killing the same few types of respawning enemies over and over. There's no point to exploration either, because all there is to find are lockers and caches with money, ammo, or one of the hundreds of different weapons with small differences in stats that have you stop all the time to compare them to the ones you're carrying. Every now and then there's an annoying boss fight, too.

I kept playing because I always hoped there would come something interesting at some point. Haven't tried coop yet - Ricky ignored my chat requests... 

I agree with you about borderlands EXCEPT for the graphic style being cool. I am vehemently against it - the style is quite and ugly and imo definitely a step back from their more realistic style they had before. 

I think the style is cool, at least they're trying something different. Some of the env work looks quite nice.
As for the game itself, it's ok. It's much better when playing with 3 friends obviously. I like picking up random loot, but there's not enough diversity, like in Diablo, where it works better because of all the different armor pieces etc. 

Don't Look Back. The gameplay is pretty run-of-the-mill platforming (enjoyable still) but the atmosphere is excellent.

I think metl posted it a few hundred posts ago(?) but it's good enough to be reiterated. 

My letter to Blizzard today. Hmmm.

You know if their customer support weren't so fucking useless, I'd be playing a bought physical copy already. 

by now. 

Bluesnews gave the heads up on a new DX10 renderer for the original Unreal engine and its games, I re-installed Deus Ex to give it a try and its fantastic.

Its completely faithful to the look of the original Unreal engine, no mucking around with new shaders or anything like that, it does support things like HDR but you can turn if off if you don't want it. You can also use AA and AF etc and it works flawlessly (with deus ex at least).

Obviously as its DX10, you need windows Vista or Win7. It fully supports Deus Ex, Unreal 1, Unreal Tournament, and Rune so far.

Page with info : http://www.kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/

Download : http://www.kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/files/d3d10drv-v21.zip

You also need the very latest version of direct X, linky : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en&Hash=j0Zh1cSQXtbknX9RwKYa55NxhcjvXOd3%2b%2b5WaCJmoRLPkJ6dydzdeuTo9Ii0Zxv0iCFWsqUmFMKPIKV008JDDg%3d%3d

And you also need some visual c++ runtimes 2010 update, linky : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a7b7a05e-6de6-4d3a-a423-37bf0912db84

I had forgotten how awesome DX was, im really enjoying playing through it again :) 

There's also an inofficial patch 227, with new renderers, lots of fixes, Linux and OpenGL support:

http://www.oldunreal.com/oldunrealpatches.html 

thanks for the heads up on deus ex. man what a great game... probably give it a run through now. :)