Messages posted by: (DC)DEMONSLAYER

Grats Cribbage. Wonder who will be next to the 1K level?

HighwratH wrote:

I own it, played it when first purchased but in the absence of a server like DC it didn't keep my interest long. I would say that if DC set up an invasion server for it I would play.

Vote please.

Dragon7350 wrote:

Do you want votes from people who haven't played UT3, do not own it, or can't run it?

I need to see who wants to play UT3. Those who's machines will not handle the game can vote as well but they need to qualify their vote.

I need to be able to gauge the interest as setting up the server will be expensive and I do not wish to spend the money if there will be no players.

Ok, I need to gauge the interest of our community towards a UT3 invasion server. If there is not a lot of interest in playing one of the invasion mods available, then I will not go any further in trying to set up a server.

Please vote one way or the other. Keep in mind the various ages of the players' computers as some will not be able to handle UT3.

Dru has fixed the problem with the forums being down and the server slow to load maps. Thanks for the patience.

Yep, the whole world knows now. The Denver metro area has been socked in by more than 24" of snow in the last 12 hours.

Flak Monkey wrote:

There could be a short between the keyboard and the chair.

I thought of that too, but couldn't find you to blame it on.

Spike wrote:

Again, glad you are getting to retire at all.

Still have a little less than 7 years to go............many things can happen in that time. That's the reason for retirement planning, any planning is better than none at all and the earlier, the better. My wife and I are fortunate that we will have more coming in than most folks but it still doesn't make it any easier to like.

Spike wrote:

Wow - that would be a really bad issue with RAM. Typically that type of error would be corrected and just flagged as a bad spot (or at least logged in the error message). Did you see anything in the event logs?

Nothing in the event logs that I could see.

I will get half of my high three years on my state retirement pension plus (in theory) around 60 to 80% of my social security. However, I do not count on the social security in my planning. My wife will get somewhere around 60% of her high three years and she is planning on retiring at 25 years (2013).

So, out of the roughly 56%, we have to cover all of our health insurance, life insurance, and federal/state income tax.

If possible, I do NOT plan on working another job after retirement. So, part of the planning is to find a cheaper state to live in---or---move to South America/Panama/other CHEAP retirement area. Being a good ol' southern boy, I can hook up a truck to my double-wide and pull it to where we decide to live out the rest of our lives. Currently, Texas or Flordia are the front runners for our retirement states, with Wyoming a distand third (no state income tax for any of these states).

Another thing in our favor is our debt structure--we owe less than 150% of a year's combined salary, thus making it easy to pay off the remaining debt we have, including our mobile home. Planning the budget, keeping in mind her pending retirement, will ease the shock of her lower income.

I read in an article the other day that if you put $250.00 per month away for 40 years, you will have an egg nest of over 7 digits. Unfortunately, there are very few folks that can do that while trying to raise a family, pay bills, and cover the essential expenses of living.

So you have to make up the time and money after the last kid leaves the house--roughly 10-20 years. Every little bit that you can put away helps.

Just in case you are wondering why this post, I'm using myself as an example for poor retirement planning. I was not able to save money due to divorce/child support/etc. and then try to catch up with everything.

I've narrowed the crash down to two possibles--drawing too much power from the power supply (really, an 1100 watt pw) or a bad stick of ram (even worse, brand new ram).

Before I started bringing the pc back up, I disconnected the SLI/2nd video card and took out the slot 1 ram, moved 2 and 3 into #1 and 2 slots.

Once there were no problems with the re-format and re-load of the pc, I then connected and set the 2nd video card again.

Again, no problems (yet). So, I think bad ram stick in slot 1.............

The other night when I was playing, my pc crashed due to some blip somewhere. The crash wiped out my memory manager, my bootmgr, and a host of other things. I'm slowly bringing it up and reloading stuff again.

Flak Monkey wrote:

What about social insecurity?

I have a defined retirement plan--able to retire after 20 years plus whatever is left over from SSA.

Here's the conclusion from The Guru of 3D dated 6 months ago.

Final words and conclusion

With Llano Lynx, or the AMD A8 series APUs, AMD places an attention-grabbing product onto the market for those that like to build a decent Net-PC, an entry level PC, a simple desktop PC or an HTPC.

For the desktop PC platform the Lynx series A8 APU we tested is fascinating alright, however we definitely had higher hopes for RAW processor performance. The culprit for AMD is that they made use of the Stars architecture and as such cannot compete with Intel on that level compared to Sandy Bridge. It will take up-to 2012 until Llano gets updated to a new CPU architecture based off Bulldozer, that project is called Trinerty. But Intel is releasing Ivy Bridge in 2012 as well. So yeah we had hoped for much higher-per core performance. It's not all about raw unadulterated processor performance though as AMD abundantly makes clear.

See, the strong point of Llano obviously is the embedded GPU and combined with their A75 chipset features like native SATA-600 and USB 3.0 support. Next to that, the powerful software suite surrounding Llano definitely brings heaps of advantages to AMD opposed to the competition.

And as such I foresee that Llano will be huge in the notebook market, and perhaps a little less strong in the PC market initially. For notebooks for example, with Llano AMD effectively kills off the market for NVIDIA with products like an AMD processor / NVIDIA GPU combo. Llano offers good CPU performance, excellent multi-media options, the Full HD experience and even a great gaming experience -- I'm still talking laptops here ok?

But back to the desktop platform, for the PC the Lynx based A8-3850 is a decent performer processor wise at best. The integrated GPU however is a class of its own and it will accelerate all GPU assisted applications extremely well. For HTPC usage the Llano Lynx processors will be hot stuff as for little money you can design an HTPC that just downright kicks ass. The 400 shader processors will allow you to do massive additional post-processing on your content and the UVD3 engine will offer you seriously good Full-HD accelerated playback from pretty much any source. Also think about stuff like AMD Accelerate where you can use the processor and shader processors to compute and accelerate more generic applications. If the software supports it, that's where the A series APU will kick in hard.

We also have to realize that with the embedded GPU the dynamic of the 'generic processor' changed. Combine the processor with the GPU and see that GPU as an extra parallel co-processor for a second. Imagine software taking advantage of both these units simultaneously. That's where the true power is, and unfortunately for AMD... most benchmarks and tests are just not ready for that, as 80% of the tests and benchmarks focus mainly on just the processor. Ironically a test like the 3DMark Vantage P score is probably a very good indicator as it emasures both CPU and GPU performance.

For the series A8 processor that we tested we have to admit that the power envelope is decent. With use of the integrated GPU we noted down 39 Watts in idle and roughly 110 Watts when we stress the APU, that's pretty okay really. Heat levels of the APU are a non-issue as well, obviously we always recommend a proper cooler. But expect a thermal envelope of 50 Degrees C with a decent cooler and heavy APU stress. We did not include final temperatures in our tests just yet as we noticed a weird offset in the monitoring software, likely related due to a BIOS or sensor offset issue.

Gaming then; well Llano for Laptops will be really good, the 400 shader processors and that graphics engine will deliver decent performance for laptop monitor resolutions. Fact remains that after 1280x1024 the IGP will slowly run into problems. Performance wise the lower end games with lower quality settings however will run 1600x800 reasonably, and yeah that is just a colossal step forward for an integrated GPU.

Say if you are on a very steep budget, well... gaming is becoming an option and AMD certainly offers the best IGP in the business. Especially compared to the IGPs in say Core i5 660/661 and the current Core i3/i5/i7 Sandy Bridge series processors, the A8 series will dominate, rule and has set a completely new standard.

From that other point of view, sure... if you have gaming needs in decent resolutions with respectable image quality settings and modern more stringent on the GPU based games, you will need to be on the lookout for a dedicated graphics card. But obviously, that was as expected.

Overclocking -- I'll need to redo and check out overclocking performance on another motherboard. The ASROCK motherboard in use while applying tweaks did not show any differences in performance. You will be limited though to roughly 3800 MHz as that's how far the multiplier goes, and the baseclock .. well you hardly can tweak on that really. So we'll look into that in a later stage or with other A75 motherboard reviews.

Alright, let's sum things up; the AMD A8 processor as tested today offers what AMD always offers, a very affordable alternative with every gadget available on-board. If you purchase an A8 APU with the combination of that A75 based motherboard, you'll have a processor, graphics subsystem, SATA-600 ports, USB 3.0, heaps of USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HD audio and well... everything you need to get a very up-to-date PC.

Now, if you combine all these features with the APU price you'll be surprised, the AMD A8-3850 APU as reviewed today will cost you give or take 129 USD / 90 EUR, and that's a hard price to beat for all the features and GPU goodness you receive alright. So with the A series APU AMD have started something new, a heterogeneous piece of technology that will address a very specific market and that's from low-end to mid-range PC. The years to come will be interesting as slowly but steadily we are moving towards system-on-a-chip designs for the PC and notebook segment. We had hoped for some more CPU power, but that graphics subsystem certainly compensates for a lot. Intel must be scratching their heads right now, as AMD made a massive step forward today.

Look at the entire infrastructure versus features, not just the processor power -- that's what's it's all about -- its Fusion my man.

And CNET"s

Conclusions

Budget gamers in particular should be excited about AMD's new family of APU desktop chips due to their strong 3D performance. We'd hoped to see faster graphics processing in Photoshop CS5 as well, but Intel's standard CPU performance superiority seems to give it the edge there and with programs that rely on more traditional CPU processing. If you regularly use a program designed to make use of multiple processing cores, the A8-3850 is a better choice. Regardless of situational hair-splitting, AMD's A8-3850 is robust enough to offer an acceptable computing experience, and its 3D processing power, both by itself and in conjunction with a lower-end Radeon graphics card, should make this chip popular, particularly among mainstream gamers.

Test system configurations:

AMD test bed
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 2.9GHz AMD A8-3850; ASRock A75 Pro4 motherboard; 8GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM/1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 512MB ATI Radeon HD 6550 embedded; 500GB, 7,200rpm Western Digital SATA II hard drive

Intel test bed
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 3.1GHz Intel Core i3 2105; 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; Intel DZZ68DB motherboard; 64MB Intel HD Graphics 2000 embedded; 500GB, 7,200rpm Western Digital SATA II hard drive

Read more: http://reviews.cnet.com/processors/amd-a8-3850/4505-3086_7-34843944-2.html#ixzz1kUeCBWYn

I've been kinda following the apu setup since it was first announced. It's a good idea in theory combining the gpu/cpu onto one chip. However, I do not think that it would be adequate for hard core gaming. How it will run in reality, who knows. I would wait until some folks have some practical, hands on experience.

Understanding your situation, I'd grab the I7 2600/2600K Sandy Bridge instead. The 2600K quad core is darn near equal in processing power as my 6 core extreme 990X and the Sandy Bridge 6 core processors are kicking my rear end.

You can get a barebone 2600 for around $450.00 and a barebone 2600K for around $500.00.