The Antec P180 case (which is mostly tool-less) has 2 hard drive cages, the bottom cage mounts the drives on their side so that air is pulled in from the front (through a filter), past up to 4 drives mounted on edge, through a 120mm tri-speed fan, then pushed to the power supply. The drives are mounted into the cage via screws which are fully insulated from the metal of the cage via a half-inch-long soft rubber grommet.
I have built a fairly silent PC that, during normal operation, is barely audible. During gaming, it is not noticable with even moderate sound from the speakers at a medium volume, scores 7800 in 3DMark05, and cost $1800 (7 months ago). Today you could build it even cheaper:
Antec P180 Case (a sound-dampening, full size steel case built for heat management and airflow, using multiple tri-speed 120mm fans) Antec TruPower 2 550 W power supply (in the P180 case, it goes down below, in a separate air flow chamber, so it stays pretty cool) Athlon64 3700+. Best gaming price/performance at the time I built the system. Stock heatsink/fan. This is where my noise comes from, and I was satisified; 32C/3000rpm idle, 44C/5500rpm at max load after 12 hours in an unvented, uncomfortably warm room. Audigy 2 ZS. Cuz I like EAX, k? eVGA GeForce 7800 GTX (nowadays, the 7900 GT is same performance but for $200 less than what I paid, and lower power/heat, and the 7900 GTX is more power for about $100 less and same power/heat) 2 matched Corsair TWINX 1-gig sticks 160 gig SATA-II Western Digital HD Sony DVD-ROM (they make fairly quiet drives) ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. Uses a heatpipe to move the chipset heat into the airflow coming off the CPU. Works fine. No noisy motherboard chipset fans.
It isn't silent, but its quiet enough. If it's not running a game, I can only tell it's on if I concentrate and listen for it. If the window is open (I'm not on a busy street), the ambient outside noise drowns it out entirely.
Those numbers, if correct, are somewhat interesting when you consider the competition each console was up against:
NES - practically no competition. 60 million units SNES - competition was the Genesis, which did somewhat weakly. 49 million units, still not bad. N64 - up against the PSX. 32 million units is still pretty strong sales considering what it was up against GameCube - 21 million. Up against the PS2 and Xbox.
While using the 60 million as a baseline for future sales is bad metrics, it puts things into perspective when you consider the competition each iteration of Nintendo hardware was up against. The N64 sells half as many units as the NES, but unlike the NES has strong competition to go against. GameCube has 2 strong consoles to compete against, and sells 1/3 as many units.
They apparently won't ship to a different address than the billing address, or another address registered with the credit card company (or so I've been told).
They also apparently hold large orders an extra day if you are a new customer (they did this with me, I ordered $1800 worth of components for my new computer in one big order). I've been told by others that Newegg did the same on the first large order, but that after that, they don't hesitate.
I love NewEgg, but in-laws had bad experience
on
A Look Inside Newegg
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· Score: 1
While I use and recommend Newegg, my wife's parents ordered a printer and a digital camera.
The printer didn't work, but Canon resolved that. The box that the camera was empty... claimed it weighed several pounds, but it was nothing but peanuts. The first call to Newegg seemed like they would actually ship the camera, but it took 3 more calls for them to actually do so. I was pretty shocked about that.
They won't buy from Newegg again... which is too bad, I still consider them to be one of the best online retailers. This means they'll instead drive over to Best Buy...
From what I had heard, it was budget that cut the suits out... frankly, following the book too close wouldn't make a good movie; it was too serious and pushed it's political views too hard to translate well to a movie.
The direct to video sequel was so low budget, it took place entirely indoors with no real bugs, past the initial CG bug scene. They filmed the movie as dark as possible to cover up the poor state of their props and lack of remaining SFX budget.
The CG cartoon series "Roughneck Chronicles", however, takes the characters established in the movie, reboots the plot with more correlation to the book (at least as far as the Skinnies go, initially), and goes a bit further. Plus it has the powersuit (and then some), but the bugs are still the Movie bugs, not the Book bugs (no spiders-with-laserguns). Unfortunately, budget cuts there too meant a few 'clip show' episodes, more time spent watching simple advance-and-fire footage, and less actual plot and dialogue; watching more than two episodes in a row is a bit difficult, but overall the show was enjoyable. Sadly, it never saw a second season, but the DVDs were released a bit smartly, each disc being a 5-episode 'campaign arcs' the way the show aired (5 episodes covering a single deployment for the unit, each arc in a different location).
We were both working on an RP-centric MUD (I as programmer, her as lead builder), when we met.
It started as one of my friends asking "What do you want for your birthday?" and I replied "To meet a girl who likes science fiction." Turns out she was online and listening to the chat at that moment...
I have found NOD32 to be a far superior product to Norton and Mcafee (not that it's hard to be a superior product)... extremely low system utilization, I don't even notice it's there, until a virus warning pops up (such as the few email viruses that get past the filters on my mail server).
It also proactively stopped all the common WMF exploits.
Perhaps you wish I was trying to justify a purchase of an MS product.
I was pointing out the financial reasoning of why allowing homebrew on the Xbox360 is not in Microsoft's best interest. I don't really care whether they do or don't allow it, or who does or does not buy an Xbox. Try following the grandparent posts of the conversation.
Microsoft loses money on each system sold currently, and (hopes to) make it up on license fees for game sales. More games sold is more money in their pocket. Each unit sold is money lost.
So every unit sold for homebrew modding for Linux, or modding for running pirated titles, is a financial loss, since it won't have any game sales to offset the loss and turn a profit.
The majority of game sales for the big publishers like EA, Activision, etc, are not through specialty retailers like EB and Gamestop, but through general retailers like Walmart and Target. These retailers probably get lower wholesale prices than the specialty retailers because of a larger volume. Granted these same retailers sell a much smaller selection than specialty stores, but that selection is pretty focused on the big-publisher titles.
Back in ancient days (pre-500 AD for example), it was not a rare thing for vaguely look-alike, or not even look-alike people, to claim to be someone famous/important in a village or town where nobody could invalidate the claim (or those who would validate it were being duped or willing participants).
This is a quite old crime. The difference is that now identity theft of everyday people can be lucrative, and you don't even need to look like them or deal with tricking others. And you don't have to worry about being lynched or stoned, just going to jail.
I wouldn't rely on Symantec to stop your computer from catching anything.
NOD32 (best Antivirus I've ever used, no system performance hit, whereas latest McAfee dropped my mother-in-law's computer's speed by half) and a few others catch it, apparently.
While I do not have nearly as much flight experience as you (I have a whopping hour at the controls have a helicopter).
I play Desert Combat and Battlefield 2 a lot, particularly using the helicopters. When I went for my helicopter flight lesson (fullfilling one of those "things I want to do in my lifetime"), the trainer was impressed with my ability to fly and manage the controls, particularly in maintaining a 3-control hover for extended time; the trainer claims (don't know how true) that only 1 in 100 (or was it 1/1000?) first-time students can maintain a 3-control hover in their first lesson. He suggested that my time playing video games probably had something to do with that, and I'm inclined to agree there: I already had some basic training via video games to responding to changes in the horizon (tilting/rotating), and that made it much easier to compensate.
My issue was a lack of checking instruments; I was so used to (virtual) flying by view and the horizon that I tended not to check my speed/altitude often enough and would go too fast or get too low/high in general flight.
Demographic: Fat Nerds with no lives who have money to waste and are looking for an escape destroying things Videogame: Expensive unstructured role-playing game requiring a $300 video card Advertise: mainstream TV channels and everywhere game/computer related on the 'net
My understanding of the situation is that the man behind NTP DID try to innovate and bring a product to market, but his product failed in the marketplace (it was a few years ahead of the market's interest or need of such a product).
So RIM comes along a few years later, and makes a device that supposedly uses very similiar technology that the patent covers, and makes big bucks with it.
At the company I work at, which employs over 400 people at our location alone, if a non-manager/non-executive wears a tie or corporate-casual clothing, people think they're going to go interview somewhere that day.
I am hoping turnout this year is good; I'd hate to see the west coast version of the conference die from lack of interest. However, it is only 3 months or so after GenCon Indy, so it might be too-much-too-soon for the gaming population at large.
PC games are notorious for being slow and skipping frames. Some console games do this, but that's considered a bug in the console game and it doesn't do so well if it performs badly.
Many modern console games run 20-30 FPS, with 30 FPS being a 'goal'. They also generally do not necessarily attempt to run at a fixed frame rate, unlike consoles of previous generations. Unless, that fixed frame rate is capping off the frame rate at the lower end of a fluctuating spectrum so as to prevent uneven performance.
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The Antec P180 case (which is mostly tool-less) has 2 hard drive cages, the bottom cage mounts the drives on their side so that air is pulled in from the front (through a filter), past up to 4 drives mounted on edge, through a 120mm tri-speed fan, then pushed to the power supply. The drives are mounted into the cage via screws which are fully insulated from the metal of the cage via a half-inch-long soft rubber grommet.
I have built a fairly silent PC that, during normal operation, is barely audible. During gaming, it is not noticable with even moderate sound from the speakers at a medium volume, scores 7800 in 3DMark05, and cost $1800 (7 months ago). Today you could build it even cheaper:
Antec P180 Case (a sound-dampening, full size steel case built for heat management and airflow, using multiple tri-speed 120mm fans)
Antec TruPower 2 550 W power supply (in the P180 case, it goes down below, in a separate air flow chamber, so it stays pretty cool)
Athlon64 3700+. Best gaming price/performance at the time I built the system.
Stock heatsink/fan. This is where my noise comes from, and I was satisified; 32C/3000rpm idle, 44C/5500rpm at max load after 12 hours in an unvented, uncomfortably warm room.
Audigy 2 ZS. Cuz I like EAX, k?
eVGA GeForce 7800 GTX (nowadays, the 7900 GT is same performance but for $200 less than what I paid, and lower power/heat, and the 7900 GTX is more power for about $100 less and same power/heat)
2 matched Corsair TWINX 1-gig sticks
160 gig SATA-II Western Digital HD
Sony DVD-ROM (they make fairly quiet drives)
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. Uses a heatpipe to move the chipset heat into the airflow coming off the CPU. Works fine. No noisy motherboard chipset fans.
It isn't silent, but its quiet enough. If it's not running a game, I can only tell it's on if I concentrate and listen for it. If the window is open (I'm not on a busy street), the ambient outside noise drowns it out entirely.
Those numbers, if correct, are somewhat interesting when you consider the competition each console was up against:
NES - practically no competition. 60 million units
SNES - competition was the Genesis, which did somewhat weakly. 49 million units, still not bad.
N64 - up against the PSX. 32 million units is still pretty strong sales considering what it was up against
GameCube - 21 million. Up against the PS2 and Xbox.
While using the 60 million as a baseline for future sales is bad metrics, it puts things into perspective when you consider the competition each iteration of Nintendo hardware was up against. The N64 sells half as many units as the NES, but unlike the NES has strong competition to go against. GameCube has 2 strong consoles to compete against, and sells 1/3 as many units.
They apparently won't ship to a different address than the billing address, or another address registered with the credit card company (or so I've been told).
They also apparently hold large orders an extra day if you are a new customer (they did this with me, I ordered $1800 worth of components for my new computer in one big order). I've been told by others that Newegg did the same on the first large order, but that after that, they don't hesitate.
While I use and recommend Newegg, my wife's parents ordered a printer and a digital camera.
The printer didn't work, but Canon resolved that. The box that the camera was empty... claimed it weighed several pounds, but it was nothing but peanuts. The first call to Newegg seemed like they would actually ship the camera, but it took 3 more calls for them to actually do so. I was pretty shocked about that.
They won't buy from Newegg again... which is too bad, I still consider them to be one of the best online retailers. This means they'll instead drive over to Best Buy...
From what I had heard, it was budget that cut the suits out... frankly, following the book too close wouldn't make a good movie; it was too serious and pushed it's political views too hard to translate well to a movie.
The direct to video sequel was so low budget, it took place entirely indoors with no real bugs, past the initial CG bug scene. They filmed the movie as dark as possible to cover up the poor state of their props and lack of remaining SFX budget.
The CG cartoon series "Roughneck Chronicles", however, takes the characters established in the movie, reboots the plot with more correlation to the book (at least as far as the Skinnies go, initially), and goes a bit further. Plus it has the powersuit (and then some), but the bugs are still the Movie bugs, not the Book bugs (no spiders-with-laserguns). Unfortunately, budget cuts there too meant a few 'clip show' episodes, more time spent watching simple advance-and-fire footage, and less actual plot and dialogue; watching more than two episodes in a row is a bit difficult, but overall the show was enjoyable. Sadly, it never saw a second season, but the DVDs were released a bit smartly, each disc being a 5-episode 'campaign arcs' the way the show aired (5 episodes covering a single deployment for the unit, each arc in a different location).
We were both working on an RP-centric MUD (I as programmer, her as lead builder), when we met.
It started as one of my friends asking "What do you want for your birthday?" and I replied "To meet a girl who likes science fiction." Turns out she was online and listening to the chat at that moment...
I have found NOD32 to be a far superior product to Norton and Mcafee (not that it's hard to be a superior product)... extremely low system utilization, I don't even notice it's there, until a virus warning pops up (such as the few email viruses that get past the filters on my mail server).
It also proactively stopped all the common WMF exploits.
There is no monthly fee. The fee is only for the Xbox Live 'Gold', which features online multiplayer.
Marketplace is available to all, even the free Silver accounts.
The games are purchase-once-keep-forver. You do not need to renew or pay a maintenance fee.
Agreed; while it has had it's growing pains, it's an awesome game, and I still play it almost every night.
I'm sorry I took it as an attack since that wasn't your attention. My apologies for responding somewhat harshly in response.
Perhaps you wish I was trying to justify a purchase of an MS product.
I was pointing out the financial reasoning of why allowing homebrew on the Xbox360 is not in Microsoft's best interest. I don't really care whether they do or don't allow it, or who does or does not buy an Xbox. Try following the grandparent posts of the conversation.
Microsoft loses money on each system sold currently, and (hopes to) make it up on license fees for game sales. More games sold is more money in their pocket. Each unit sold is money lost.
So every unit sold for homebrew modding for Linux, or modding for running pirated titles, is a financial loss, since it won't have any game sales to offset the loss and turn a profit.
The majority of game sales for the big publishers like EA, Activision, etc, are not through specialty retailers like EB and Gamestop, but through general retailers like Walmart and Target. These retailers probably get lower wholesale prices than the specialty retailers because of a larger volume. Granted these same retailers sell a much smaller selection than specialty stores, but that selection is pretty focused on the big-publisher titles.
Back in ancient days (pre-500 AD for example), it was not a rare thing for vaguely look-alike, or not even look-alike people, to claim to be someone famous/important in a village or town where nobody could invalidate the claim (or those who would validate it were being duped or willing participants).
This is a quite old crime. The difference is that now identity theft of everyday people can be lucrative, and you don't even need to look like them or deal with tricking others. And you don't have to worry about being lynched or stoned, just going to jail.
NOD32 (www.nod32.com) catches it. Supposedly McAfee can catch it as well, but Norton doesn't.
I wouldn't rely on Symantec to stop your computer from catching anything.
NOD32 (best Antivirus I've ever used, no system performance hit, whereas latest McAfee dropped my mother-in-law's computer's speed by half) and a few others catch it, apparently.
While I do not have nearly as much flight experience as you (I have a whopping hour at the controls have a helicopter).
I play Desert Combat and Battlefield 2 a lot, particularly using the helicopters. When I went for my helicopter flight lesson (fullfilling one of those "things I want to do in my lifetime"), the trainer was impressed with my ability to fly and manage the controls, particularly in maintaining a 3-control hover for extended time; the trainer claims (don't know how true) that only 1 in 100 (or was it 1/1000?) first-time students can maintain a 3-control hover in their first lesson. He suggested that my time playing video games probably had something to do with that, and I'm inclined to agree there: I already had some basic training via video games to responding to changes in the horizon (tilting/rotating), and that made it much easier to compensate.
My issue was a lack of checking instruments; I was so used to (virtual) flying by view and the horizon that I tended not to check my speed/altitude often enough and would go too fast or get too low/high in general flight.
Macintosh was just a codename, too. It stuck. Who knows, maybe Revolution will stick around.
SWG started out as sort of a mix:
Demographic: Fat Nerds with no lives who have money to waste and are looking for an escape destroying things
Videogame: Expensive unstructured role-playing game requiring a $300 video card
Advertise: mainstream TV channels and everywhere game/computer related on the 'net
The most amusing product placement of any movie I can recall was definitely in Demolition Man.
My understanding of the situation is that the man behind NTP DID try to innovate and bring a product to market, but his product failed in the marketplace (it was a few years ahead of the market's interest or need of such a product).
So RIM comes along a few years later, and makes a device that supposedly uses very similiar technology that the patent covers, and makes big bucks with it.
At the company I work at, which employs over 400 people at our location alone, if a non-manager/non-executive wears a tie or corporate-casual clothing, people think they're going to go interview somewhere that day.
I am hoping turnout this year is good; I'd hate to see the west coast version of the conference die from lack of interest. However, it is only 3 months or so after GenCon Indy, so it might be too-much-too-soon for the gaming population at large.
PC games are notorious for being slow and skipping frames. Some console games do this, but that's considered a bug in the console game and it doesn't do so well if it performs badly.
Many modern console games run 20-30 FPS, with 30 FPS being a 'goal'. They also generally do not necessarily attempt to run at a fixed frame rate, unlike consoles of previous generations. Unless, that fixed frame rate is capping off the frame rate at the lower end of a fluctuating spectrum so as to prevent uneven performance.