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ETPC posted:So the annual "microsoft tells us it's good for it bb" has started. I'll believe Microsoft cares about PC gaming when they stop throwing the PC under the bus by paying companies to release only for the 360. And publishing more stuff on the PC wouldn't hurt either. The only near future "good thing" for PC gaming is the next generation of Intel integrated graphics on the Sandy Bridge chips in January. If Intel actually gets its act together with decent performance integrated graphics and drivers that work, you could play most current gen titles on any new PC without having to buy a graphics card. The biggest problem is PC gaming is the rise of consumer laptops that can't play games due to Intel graphics. Fixing that would almost double the potential sales of games. El_Matarife fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 25, 2010 |
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Dec 25, 2010 00:42
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Srebrenica Surprise posted:The Zalman clipons are flimsy and staticy and the cord is annoying. Buy the Logitech USB $20 one, change its volume level from 5 to like 80 in Windows, then set it wherever on your desk you have space. It'll pick up your voice without static from anywhere. I second this. Try not to low-ball on a mic. I own a 5$ Zalman mic and its...well...5$ of static ridden quality. It picks up everything but my voice and is just a pain in the arse to use. I live in a small and full house, so im currently looking for a mic that I can mute and adjust immediately, so when the ventilation hits the defecation, I can save myself any potential embarrassment.
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Dec 25, 2010 03:16
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The Logitech one even has a big glowy green button to turn it off right in front of the mic 
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Dec 25, 2010 03:22
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Frostillicus posted:I'm going to disagree with you here, but it's partly because of my personal situation. I have a job that requires a lot of travel, and I spend tons of time in hotels during the work week. I bought an Asus G73 gaming laptop almost a year ago, and I get a ton of use out of it. I would definitely prefer to be at home gaming on my desktop which is more powerful and cost less, but I can't take it with me on the road. I have a G73 too, and am perpetually trapped in driver update hell. I seriously am never buying an ATI video card ever again after all the horrible, horrible problems I have had trying to update my goddamn drivers, no matter how technically superior the hardware may or may not be it just is not worth dealing with the crappy installer they use. I travel once a month or so which makes the laptop a little bit handy, but I should have stuck with a desktop  There was also the grey screen of death issue with the Radeon mobility 5870, where it'd regularly freeze and require rebooting any time it had to do anything graphically intensive. They released a vBIOS update that fixed it a while back, but before that the laptop was pretty much useless for high-end gaming, which is the entire reason it had such a high price tag! At least it doesn't run in to overheating problems. Also, can anyone recommend me a decent mousepad? My old one broke, and I'm interested in ordering a high quality one that'll last longer. Unfortunately, most of the mousepads I've looked at are ridiculous gaming mousepads the size of four normal mousepads stuck together, with huge price tags and questionable quality. I also use a MX518 which apparently runs in to issues with certain mousepads, and I am fairly clueless as to which.
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Dec 25, 2010 03:57
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Coach Sport posted:I have a G73 too, and am perpetually trapped in driver update hell. I seriously am never buying an ATI video card ever again after all the horrible, horrible problems I have had trying to update my goddamn drivers, no matter how technically superior the hardware may or may not be it just is not worth dealing with the crappy installer they use. I travel once a month or so which makes the laptop a little bit handy, but I should have stuck with a desktop I got a Saitek Cyborg mousepad with my R.A.T. mouse and it's actually really nice, if you want a hard mousepad. Has different surfaces on each side and tracks well and while it's a hard pad, it doesn't rub my wrist like some of the earlier Razer pads did. No experience with Logitech mice on it though, I used the RAT on it for awhile but that mouse has some problems, now I'm using a MS sidewinder X8 with no problems. For $15 bucks, it's hard to beat.
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Dec 25, 2010 04:17
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Methos posted:This thread is dying like PC gaming. PC gamers don't need to pat each other on the back every 30 seconds with huge megathreads to know how awesome we are. After twenty years of dominance, we just know it already. :smugathon:
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Dec 25, 2010 04:39
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for my birthday last year my girlfriend got me a WarmKeyBoard and some fingerless gloves Its a heated keyboard for typing at 2am on those chilly winter nights and its AMAZING
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Dec 25, 2010 05:01
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Diamond posted:for my birthday last year my girlfriend got me a WarmKeyBoard and some fingerless gloves Its a heated keyboard for typing at 2am on those chilly winter nights and its AMAZING ...and yep, that is a real thing. Still working on why.
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Dec 25, 2010 05:06
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Diamond posted:for my birthday last year my girlfriend got me a WarmKeyBoard and some fingerless gloves Its a heated keyboard for typing at 2am on those chilly winter nights and its AMAZING Do you PC game in the Siberian wilderness or something because I can't figure out why you'd need a heated keyboard and gloves to type with.
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Dec 25, 2010 05:24
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Node posted:Do you PC game in the Siberian wilderness or something because I can't figure out why you'd need a heated keyboard and gloves to type with. Believe it or not, people still live in houses without central heating or great radiators.
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Dec 25, 2010 05:29
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I know I could never truly appreciate S.T.A.L.K.E.R. without my 40 square miles of Ukrainian wilderness peripheral.
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Dec 25, 2010 05:41
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Coach Sport posted:I have a G73 too, and am perpetually trapped in driver update hell. I seriously am never buying an ATI video card ever again after all the horrible, horrible problems I have had trying to update my goddamn drivers, no matter how technically superior the hardware may or may not be it just is not worth dealing with the crappy installer they use. I travel once a month or so which makes the laptop a little bit handy, but I should have stuck with a desktop Goddamn you are preaching the truth. The drivers for their mobile cards are an order of magnitude below whatever the desktop drivers are. Be forewarned if you decide to explore ATI mobility options, as I didn't find this opinion expressed anywhere obvious when I was putting things together earlier this year. When they work, it's great, but when they gently caress up (and they will gently caress up) it's a nightmare from which there is no escape.
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Dec 25, 2010 05:51
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Hahah, ATI's mobile drivers are pretty great. I set up a laptop for a family member and if I can remember the process right, I downloaded and extracted an installer, which downloaded another installer to C:\ATI\, which extracted an installer to %tmp%, which I then browsed to to run manually and watched a bunch of ads for video games while a status bar flickered back and forth giving me no actual information as to how far the install was going. I think about 5 minutes in it finally got around to installing the actual driver as the monitor turned off for a second, then I had to wait another 4 or 5 for it to finish. 
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Dec 25, 2010 06:05
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This thread just makes me want my X-mas/graduation present even more, im ignoring the SSH thread and building this monster of a rig with a SSD and a GTX 570 and spending way too much money.
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Dec 25, 2010 06:15
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Srebrenica Surprise posted:The Zalman clipons are flimsy and staticy and the cord is annoying. Buy the Logitech USB $20 one, change its volume level from 5 to like 80 in Windows, then set it wherever on your desk you have space. It'll pick up your voice without static from anywhere. I have one of those, and it's at 100 in Windows and in game, but everyone complains that it's quiet. Not a problem in voip where people can turn me up, but in everything it's really quiet and I wish it was like all the others who are apparently super loud.
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Dec 25, 2010 06:31
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Can someone recommend some quality WIRELESS headphones? Wired headsets and headphones have been the bane of my existence for years. I am forever getting the wire caught in some crack of my chair and having it tug on my head, or getting tangled in it when entering and exiting the chair. I've gone through so many in the past years, and i want the pain to stop!
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Dec 25, 2010 06:34
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Devil Wears Wings posted:ArmA II - Probably the most realistic military shooter out there. WARNING: Requires one helluva CPU, and probably a SSD, to run well. How bad will this game run on a PC with a GTX 280 and a dual core E8500 with no SSD. Will the game be somewhat playable? Edit: 4 gigs of ram and Vista 64 too btw.
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Dec 25, 2010 06:39
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The Bramble posted:Can someone recommend some quality WIRELESS headphones? Wired headsets and headphones have been the bane of my existence for years. I am forever getting the wire caught in some crack of my chair and having it tug on my head, or getting tangled in it when entering and exiting the chair. I've gone through so many in the past years, and i want the pain to stop! They all suck, without exception. There's a reason you almost never see them, nobody sells them. Get something with a coiled cord, when coiled it's pretty short so probably won't get stuck in your chair, but it's also long so you won't just have it tug on your head.
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Dec 25, 2010 06:40
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quote:ATI Mobility Drivers!! That's really sad to hear, since I wanted a laptop with ATI since they tend to behave better with older Windows games. Anyone here with a high-end GeForce card in their laptop that has tried to play any Windows games circa 1999-2003 no problem? Charles Martel fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Dec 25, 2010 |
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Dec 25, 2010 07:30
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Coach Sport posted:I have a G73 too, and am perpetually trapped in driver update hell. I seriously am never buying an ATI video card ever again after all the horrible, horrible problems I have had trying to update my goddamn drivers, no matter how technically superior the hardware may or may not be it just is not worth dealing with the crappy installer they use. As an owner of an ATI Radeon HD5870 [desktop version], I can say that ATI absolutely sucked for me. I am normally a NVIDIA guy, and wanted to try ATI for a while. Well, I did, and drivers were the worst. They broke a few games for me and made some unplayable, it took me a good 3 weeks to figure out what was going wrong, and in the end I had to under-clock my own card for it to work. The HD5870 is faster, slightly louder, but cooler and a really really sweet piece of hardware. But I can't believe how awful those drivers were. It seemed like a common problem on the ATI forums Again, the quality of the card is great, but I couldn't recommend ATI to a newcomer, given how much hoops I had to jump to just so I can get the card working as intended.
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Dec 25, 2010 07:43
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Does anyone know of any good recent economic/tycoon type games? I'm a sucker for those but there always seem to be a sea of lovely ones.
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Dec 25, 2010 07:49
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Same story for me. Normally an nVidia guy, but when the 4850 came out I thought I'd try ATi again (after a previous TERRIBLE driver experience with the X1300... don't remind me). It was complete hell from the moment I put it in. OpenGL barely ran, every game I tried got about 2/3 of the performance as the 8800 I was replacing, Linux drivers were completely broken, they wouldn't even start without crashing despite hours of tweaking. So I returned it, got a 9800GTX+ for the same price, and have never had driver problems and have easily double the performance. Sure, ATi may have great hardware, but that doesn't mean anything when their drivers fail on every level.
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Dec 25, 2010 07:51
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Taffer posted:Same story for me. Normally an nVidia guy, but when the 4850 came out I thought I'd try ATi again (after a previous TERRIBLE driver experience with the X1300... don't remind me). It was complete hell from the moment I put it in. OpenGL barely ran, every game I tried got about 2/3 of the performance as the 8800 I was replacing, Linux drivers were completely broken, they wouldn't even start without crashing despite hours of tweaking. I run a 4850 and I can max out basically every game I own on it at 1080p with 30+ FPS with the exception of Crysis Warhead and Metro 2033, and it never has given me any issues in Linux, including running games through Wine. Maybe you got a bum card hardware-wise?
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Dec 25, 2010 07:55
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On the RPG section, you list fallout 1/2 but Diablo series are nowhere to be found. SHAMEFUL SHAMEFUL GOON
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Dec 25, 2010 08:14
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Yeah sad story about computers is that even if you have two identical ones hardwirewise that are even running the same OS, there is still alot that can go wrong on one. I had given my friend a freshly formatted PC of mine that I had until I bought a machine this July, and he has had problems on games that I never ran into. It may have been a single program or SOMETHING that had caused it. 
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Dec 25, 2010 08:15
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:I run a 4850 and I can max out basically every game I own on it at 1080p with 30+ FPS with the exception of Crysis Warhead and Metro 2033, and it never has given me any issues in Linux, including running games through Wine. Maybe you got a bum card hardware-wise? It's possible, but that gives me a 0 for 3 track record with ATi, each one being more lovely than the last, so I'm not going to bother wasting money on them again. My nVidia experience has been without problem since day one, so I'll go with "if it's ain't broke, don't fix it".
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Dec 25, 2010 08:24
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iceaim posted:How bad will this game run on a PC with a GTX 280 and a dual core E8500 with no SSD. I guess maybe this wasn't the best thread to ask this question, but I am anxious for an answer. I picked this game up yesterday since it was on sale on Steam. I never tried a truly CPU intensive game on my rig. All the games I've played on it (Mafia 2, Fallout New Vegas, The Witcher, etc) just needed a good GPU and play beautifully at 1080p.
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Dec 25, 2010 09:53
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PC gamer chiming in to say killer OP. Good work. I've been thinking about upgrading my rig. My 8800 GTX was boss back when the first Bioshock came out, but that was before they introduced PCI Express 2.0, which my motherboard doesn't have. I've been reluctant to upgrade because switching out motherboards would be a bitch, but I suppose you gotta move on sometime.
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Dec 25, 2010 10:05
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Macrame_God posted:PC gamer chiming in to say killer OP. Good work. Same Boat I am in, best solution is obscene amounts of money.
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Dec 25, 2010 10:07
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:I run a 4850 and I can max out basically every game I own on it at 1080p with 30+ FPS with the exception of Crysis Warhead and Metro 2033, and it never has given me any issues in Linux, including running games through Wine. Maybe you got a bum card hardware-wise? I have an ATI 4670, a budgety card that's also quiet and stable as heck. I can run all of what I want at respectable settings, though I generally don't play the latest and greatest games. Black Ops is the most recent, and it ran just dandy at full res with medium detail, just had to disable FSAA. No problems with drivers, ever. Never had any trouble with it or the other three ATI cards I've owned, except they tend to wear out after 2-3 years. Then it's another 80-100 bucks for another. Not a problem. Maybe it's because I gravitate toward the budget cards, which are more likely to have tried-and-true driver support?
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Dec 25, 2010 10:17
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Macrame_God posted:PC gamer chiming in to say killer OP. Good work. I had this problem a few weeks ago, but with almost every one of my parts. I needed a new CPU, but they don't make socket 939 chips anymore. But if I get a new motherboard to accomodate a new CPU, then I'd also need to get new RAM that would work with the motherboard. And I had a poorly shielded case with busted front ports. What I did was wait for Black Friday to get all my parts, which saved me about $150. Still ended up blowing about $400 on new parts though. Pretty much the only things I salvaged from my old computer were the hard drives, the video card, and the power supply.
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Dec 25, 2010 10:26
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Macrame_God posted:PC gamer chiming in to say killer OP. Good work. From what I remember from the SH/SC upgrading thread, cards will throttle themselves back to PCI Express 1.0 if necessary - your CPU is probably going to be the bottleneck at that point anyway. You'll probably end up needing a new PSU as well though - it looks as though the 8xxx series came out in 2006, so your PSU is probably a) a bit underpowered for current graphics cards (though can't say that without you telling us what it is) and b) a bit long in the tooth. Do like 404 says, save up a bit and then go over to the SH/SC thread and they'll help you build a best bang for buck rig. I'm typing this from an I5-760/ATI 5770 rig they recommended and it blows through most games (aside from Crysis and Metro 2033) at 1080p with little problem.
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Dec 25, 2010 10:37
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I'm having mixed feelings about my choice of video card: MSI R5770 HAWK (1 GB) for $140 after $20 MIR that I picked up recently... It's a MSI version of the ATI Radeon HD 5770 using their "Twin Frozr II" cooling design (in this case two fans, three heat pipes and a heat sink). So far I'm not noticing many problems, though all I'm running are Pirates of the Burning Sea and Black Ops (AA off), so the 10.12 version of the ATI desktop drivers aren't giving me noticeable problems, and the desktop remains very stable in my experience. In light of the recent 6850/6870 offerings, did I make a bad choice? (even though it's Newegg, no returns unfortunately.) I hope you agree with me that this merits inclusion in the OP: When picking the CPU/motherboard, remember that AMD is better than Intel when it comes to backwards compatibility, so keep this in mind depending on your "upgrade path"/plans. Personal example: I have a Gigabyte GA-MA780G-UD3H (rev 1.0?) motherboard that's advertised as "Socket AM3 Ready." Although I'm running a Socket AM2 processor (supposedly the Athlon X2 5050e), it supports Socket AM2+ and even Socket AM3 processors, so I could theoretically stick in a Phenom II X6 1090T (on the official compatibility list). I understand that AMD's planned octo-core CPUs are not backwards compatible with current motherboards, but that the so-called Socket AM3+ motherboards (for the octo-cores, called "Bulldozer") will be backwards-compatible with Socket AM2, Socket AM2+ and Socket AM3 CPUs.
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Dec 25, 2010 10:55
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Fil5000 posted:You'll probably end up needing a new PSU as well though - it looks as though the 8xxx series came out in 2006, so your PSU is probably a) a bit underpowered for current graphics cards (though can't say that without you telling us what it is) and b) a bit long in the tooth. I have a 1000+ KW PSU, plenty for running one graphics card, though I suspect I may need to upgrade if I'm going to SLI any of the newer cards.
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Dec 25, 2010 11:00
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Macrame_God posted:I have a 1000+ KW PSU, plenty for running one graphics card, though I suspect I may need to upgrade if I'm going to SLI any of the newer cards. Fair enough, just be mindful of the age of it as well as that some brands of PSU don't actually output anywhere near the wattage they say on the box - the hardware thread had a link recently showing how a cheap 550w supply actually died once it got put under any more than 250w of load.
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Dec 25, 2010 11:05
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Srebrenica Surprise posted:The Logitech one even has a big glowy green button to turn it off right in front of the mic Is this the mic you are referring to? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16836111601
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Dec 25, 2010 11:11
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Yeah, that's it. Also read the OP of the SH/SC thread you guys, you don't need PCI-E 2.0.
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Dec 25, 2010 18:48
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How does Xbox 360's 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon compare with a Core 2 Duo E8500? I know technically the 360 has more cores, but I have heard that the cores are scaled down. Can someone shed more light on this? All I know is my PC with an E8500 seems to produce better graphics at a better resolution than a 360 can, but I believe my GPU plays a big role in that since it has a GTX 280 which I know blows way the Xbox GPU. But I really am curious how my CPU sizes up with a Power PC CPU from 2005.
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Dec 25, 2010 20:25
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iceaim posted:How does Xbox 360's 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon compare with a Core 2 Duo E8500? I know technically the 360 has more cores, but I have heard that the cores are scaled down. Can someone shed more light on this? I don't know that much about the CPU, but I'm guessing yours is pretty close. But yeah, the real difference would be in your GPU and RAM, Xbox is bad in both areas with that.
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Dec 25, 2010 20:35
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I've gone through a lot of PC mics and they last about a year. The best one I've ever used (and am still using with fantastic quality+no drivers) is the USB Rock Band Mic. It's surprisingly clear and sensitive, though you'll have to get a little stand to hold it.
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Dec 25, 2010 21:03
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