Shadowex3

^^^ "Godlike" hardly describes Corsair in anything but quality, they're actually one of the least expensive brands of power supply. Right now the 650 non-modular (about 40a on the 12v rail) is only $100 and the 520 modular (over 50a on the 12v rails) is $110 or so. Also EVERY motherboard has onboard audio, the crosshairIII isn't special like akaru says it is. Plus it's only EAX4 instead of the current x-fi line which is EAX5. Think 64 sounds vs 128 and a lot more ability to process things. Having come from an Audigy4 to an X-fi xtrememusic there is a pretty big difference.

If you're spending more than $800 you're paying too much for underpowered hardware and should switch over to an i7 build, if you're spending $800 or less you're doing well and it's a respectable gaming computer. But, like I'm telling people way too often, you need to get a REAL power supply for someone you can trust. Corsair, PC Power and Cooling, or Seasonic are good solid power supplies that cost about as much as everyone else but are actually trustworthy and generally of a much higher quality. Also unless that CPU cooler's only about $20 just get a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme or one of the Noctua NH-U12 models.

Then in that case you probably use about 650-750 watts but you're REALLY going to be sucking down the amps rather than the watts.

if your videocard doesnt support alpha blending it's got to be old as squares. If you don't know what everything inside your PC is and what it does... you should probably find a nerd and ask him if you can pay him to upgrade your comp for you.

yousabletube with greasemonkey lets you download all the different versions of a video on youtube right from the video's page. MP4 or MP4 High Quality is usually your best bet. The trick is converting that to an mp3.

Anandtech tested comps for power consumption, you'd need SLI to get over ~350 watts of power draw. Even with lights, many optical and hard drives, and a gaming cpu and gpu you'd still very likely be under 550w without SLI. Amps on the other hand you might need a lot of, but corsairs tend to have 40+ amps on the 12v rails.

i think he meant power supplies. As always anything from Seasonic, Corsair, or PC Power and Cooling is a good power supply. Corsair's usually the cheapest, and they're CONSTANTLY on sale in newegg's newsletter. A ~550 watt corsair can easily run everything you throw at it.

Choke = server can't keep up or you're set to not recieve as many packets as you need. This guide's seriously overcomplicated and in a few places inaccurate. You want fps_max, a clientside command, to be as high as possible because there's simply no reason to ever have it lower and CSS ties your graphical updates to your network shit. That's why setting fps_max to 30 caps your rates too. If you look at the actual bandwidth requirements with net_graph 3 on you can see pretty readily that anyone and everyone with at least a 1megabit connection should just set everything to the game's max and let the servers automatically cap them. There's just no reason to have anything lower with modern internet connections, I've got a pretty crappy quality 3mbit connection and I can easily max everything out and have no choke and no loss on a 100tic server. There's a LOT of myths about source networking, this guide looks like it was designed based around those instead of the real facts. For anyone curious as to how this stuff REALLY works here's valve's official documentation and the only other trustworthy one which just did all the math for you (whisper's): http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking http://whisper.ausgamers.com/wiki/index.php/Source_rates http://whisper.ausgamers.com/wiki/index.php/Tickrate

Then post those benchmarks or stfu, seriously don't make claims and then fail to provide proof. Anyway soulkeeper: Good stuff so far, the reason we all laughed is because the Radeon 9800 is from when Half-life2 was first released so it's a really old card. It's like saying you're going to get a Corvette or a 1986 Honda Civic. Only thing I'd suggest is getting a real PSU instead of an antec since Seasonic is not making antec's power supplies anymore. The earthwatts line USED to be made by them but antec switched OEMs.

It's the lastinv quickswitch glitch usually. AWPs can fire almost twice as fast (I've seen at least scout speed if not faster) using it. It's horrifyingly effective if you're good at it but like squeezing someone's fingers to cheat with a handshake it makes you a contemptible bastard.

Do NOT get a cheapass biostar/whoever motherboard. That's like using a noname powersupply, the Mobo and PSU are the only two components capable of killing other things and since you're already getting a rosewill PSU (which I've seen let all the magic smoke out of another guy's computer already) you should at least get a decent Asus or Gigabyte motherboard. P45 or P55 are probably your best bet. If $600-ish is your budget you're going to be getting a pretty ghetto gaming comp, but either way you'll want to get an E8000 series processor rather than the E7000 ones even if it means a less powerful videocard, Valve games are MUCH more dependant on a good processor than a super high end videocard. In general: Asus and Gigabyte for motherboards Corsair, Seasonic and PC Power & Cooling for power supplies (they're worth the extra $20, REALLY!) XFX, EVGA, and BFG-Tech for Nvidia videocards Sapphire, ATI/AMD, and the Nvidia guys for ATI videocards Western Digital and Seagate for Hard Drives Gskill, Geil, Corsair, OCZ, and Mushkin for ram (Corsair and OCZ are likely the cheapest too)

The trick is finding one that uses the &fmt=18 high quality h.264w/stereo version.

I like how the icon is like 4x the size of everything else, as if they made it that huge so nobody in the server could possibly miss such a humiliating death.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=522081 But seriously, lets have highlights of useful programs that other people might not already know of: Foxit PDF Reader http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ It's not perfect, and it chokes to hell on excessive vectorized graphics, but for most everything else it's a major improvement over adobe's bloated monstrosity. Burn4Free http://www.burn4free.com/ Comes with a toolbar, but its well behaved so you can just disable it in IE/FF. It's a one-screen burning program that can burn pretty much everything in pretty much any way and shows you how much space you're taking as you go along several scales for CD/DVD and so on based on what you've put in the working area. It's extremely fast, very lightweight, and I've never made a coaster with it. QT-Lite and MPC http://www.codecguide.com/about_qt.htm http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/ Media Player Classic is exactly what it sounds like, it's a REALLY lightweight and minimalist media player for videos and whatnot, think quicktime or windows media player before the nasty bloat. QT Lite is a codec set kinda thingy that combined with MPC lets you play embedded quicktime content without needing the bloaty quicktime. Allway Sync http://allwaysync.com/ Think dropbox but inside of your network and more intelligent. Set up however many folders on two computers, set up the options, and run allway to either intelligently merge the two computers based on what's newest or force match one computer to another. You only need Allway on one comp but there are supposedly advantages to having it on both. Personally I use it to keep my laptop synced to my home computer for coursework and whatnot. That's about it, Xplorer 2 and Partition Magic are awesome as well but most people know about the latter (and it's not useful in every day life) and the former's a for-pay program.

G9's old, odd shaped, and just as expensive as the new and normal shaped g500

Case (almost always better to buy local if there isn't free shipping on newegg's newsletter) mobo hdd heatsink+fan (some come with fans, svc's better than newegg) cpu gpu (xfx, evga, or bfg-tech preferrably) ram dvd drive Power supply (corsair, seasonic, or PC power and cooling) that should be about it assuming you already have a keyboard, mouse, and monitor

Premade's obv going to be pretty bad compared to the real thing but Akaru's link seems to be the best. Replace the graphics card with something like a gtx 260/275 and power supply with a corsair 550 if possible. Either way for a premade it's pretty good.

Jesus those guys have admin for life or something. Or just really nice jobs.

So in other words it's got even MORE bandwidth issues? two 6 core packages in current architecture PCs is like trying to fuck the most beautiful pinhole in the world. It doesn't matter how nutbustingly hot she is you're still trying to thread a sausage through a keyhole.

For the zombies. Also note the rifle-style grip and pink paintjob required to get around the old Assault Weapons Ban.

No it can't because throwing more cores on doesn't do shit for you when the problem isn't the number of cores but the ability to move data around those cores and the computer. Sata and DDR3 aren't fast enough for that kind of manycore multitasking on a computer and if you're in the US you probably don't have nearly the bandwidth to host that sort of thing. [edit] Also threading isn't the all singing all dancing magic solutions to computer problems. Some things can't be split into any more threads than they already are.

Only gamers truly old as balls would know >P

While we're at it lets go back to 4:3 instead of widescreen. You get more screen area AND a higher resolution than 16:9/10 for the same number of inches. 2043x1536 beats the hell out of 1920x1080.

Except that Nvidia's mid-range videocards are still better than ATI's and cost pretty much the same AND unlike ATI (unless that's changed recently) can be had with overclocker friendly lifetime warranties and 24/7 in-USA tech support.

I think you got the wrong dude tink, I'm the only guy with a name remotely close to shoddow and I only talked about spybot search and destroy and how modern viruses tend to be more towards the hijack-your-comp end of the spectrum than the ruin-your-shit end.