need better pictures... without the top. If the computer is naked, it's only logical she needs to be too...

9/24/2010 12:03:31 PM

i have no doubt you can take better pictures of naked women.

9/24/2010 12:26:48 PM

well I do, and thus need to practice.

9/24/2010 1:26:34 PM

That was partial sarcasm. Photographers that make money off shooting initially attractive things are sub-par in my book to photographers who shoot not initially attractive things and make them attractive.

9/24/2010 1:30:22 PM

just because someone starts off with a better prop doesn't mean they are sub-par. You still have to know lighting even if you are photographing a hot chick or a fatty. Although a little more photoshop, use of shadows or cleaver coverage/cropping can mitigate it not initially attractive thing.

I don't care if they are hot or not, as long as the photographer can make a good image and knows their shit. I see plenty of "pros" that get paid to shoot hot girls that don't know a damn thing about photography.

Anyhow, a friend wants me to build him a computer for under 800. His requirement is that its gotta have a lot of hdd space and play modern games decently. He has a more modern amd vid card in his crappy pc as he thought that just upgrading his vid card would have done the trick. He's on a 5 yr old amd hp pos.

9/24/2010 2:45:44 PM

$800 excluding monitor? Can build a nice i5 system with an nvidia 460 for that.

9/24/2010 2:57:24 PM

I think he has a 5770 ati card so it's decent enough for him. I mean he basically does a lot more movies so was thinking more on the lines of an htpc setup, maybe do a raid 5 setup with a set of 1, 1.5 or 2tb drives. Probably could gut his old hdd as the main and use the dvd burner too, so that basically leaves the case, psu, mobo, cpu, ram, and extra hdd.

9/24/2010 3:11:59 PM

anyone interested in a 5870? Might 'upgrade' to a 480gtx card to help with my adobe premier pro rendering capabilities. Just a thought.

9/27/2010 1:37:37 PM

I should have gotten one 480gtx instead of the two 460's. Then I could have upgraded to two 480's in the future. Or even three. heh. Jk. I'm satisfied. At least for a couple years. Beat Crysis Warhead last night. Played it maxed out (no AA) all the way through at 1920 by 1200. Game is gorgeous. Playing through Just Cause 2 now.

About to be unemployed again while I search for more work so I'll have more time to game.

-although now that I think about it the 480's are ungodly hot and draw lots of power.

[Edited on September 27, 2010 at 1:58 PM. Reason : s]

9/27/2010 1:47:31 PM

I am in the market for a 5 series amd card for my HTPC but the 5870 seems a bit . . . overkill.

9/27/2010 8:22:56 PM

which 5870 do you have? My 5870 looks a little lonely inside the case, needs a twin.

also, general question about video cards, if I were to install 2 5870s do they have to be indentical cards? or can one be like an XFX and the other a Sapphire?

9/27/2010 10:30:47 PM

They can be different but need to be clocked the same. And obviously the same amount of memory on the card. Man two 5870's will kill.

-actually shit just noticed this:

http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/09/geforce_gtx_460_1gb_sli_vs_radeon_hd_5870_cfx

Two 460's in SLI winning out over two 5870's in crossfire. I mean they're overclocked but still.

[Edited on September 28, 2010 at 8:47 AM. Reason : s]

9/28/2010 8:28:45 AM

nvidia does it better in multi card setups, i mean you almost exactly double the performance by adding a 2nd card, amd cards tend to give you what 78% when you add a 2nd?

This is what I have

9/28/2010 8:55:53 AM

http://www.gamestop.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?product_id=84134#

460gtx Galaxy Edition $159 after MIR. That's $318 for a pretty awesome SLI set-up.

-Going to borrow a third Dell 24" tonight and try out the Nvidia Surround with the dual 460's in SLI. Never tried 3 monitor gaming before. I hope I'm not hooked cause then I'll want a third 24".

[Edited on September 28, 2010 at 9:48 AM. Reason : s]

9/28/2010 9:20:31 AM

3 monitor gaming sucks. nvidia surround does the same thing as eyefinity where it forces the game to stretch the perspective. Until they can change the position and angle of view for each monitor, stretching the one point causes more problems than it solves. Such a worthless feature so far of what I've scene. Which sucks since it was the one of the features that I got the 5870 for.

causes me to die more. Wished strategy games took advantage more of multi-monitor support like supreme commander does.

9/28/2010 10:02:18 AM

^maybe you have outdated information? I thought it actually ran the game at native resolution. So 5760x1200 in my case:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/07/20/nvidia_surround_technology_performance_review/

Pic:

http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTI3OTU3NTg3Mjd2VzNCVWJ3N0NfMV84X2wuanBn

None of those looked stretched to me. I could be wrong. I'll update tonight when I try it out.

9/28/2010 10:06:26 AM

^ new winter heaters

9/28/2010 12:45:03 PM

Yeah my two 24's already heat up the room. I love not using the heat in the winter.

9/28/2010 1:21:30 PM

ars technica came out with their new builds

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2010/09/the-ars-system-guide-september-2010-edition.ars

9/28/2010 1:52:38 PM

eh shitty builds. There's no high-end build. Just a monster $12k build with only 2 5870's. The mid range build only has an i5 with a single 460.

9/28/2010 2:03:21 PM

i wouldn't call them shitty builds, just random. keep in mind they are including monitor, speakers, kb&m, and OS.

Budget - I would have gone X4, but all things considered pretty good build.
Hot Rod - no SSD and only 4GB of memory? really? i5 is fine all things considered, but i probably would have done i7 and looked at (2) 460's in SLI, keep in mind though this isn't the God Box and they were looking for best bang/buck which i5 is definitely a lot cheaper than i7 (when you factor in mobo & memory)

they do seem to be missing a build at the $2k price point, since they have $800, $1250, $12.5k

[Edited on September 28, 2010 at 3:18 PM. Reason : .]

9/28/2010 3:14:01 PM

Quote :

"http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTI3OTU3NTg3Mjd2VzNCVWJ3N0NfMV84X2wuanBn None of those looked stretched to me. I could be wrong. I'll update tonight when I try it out."

Nope, it's stretched, just the angle of the photograph doesn't show it, but when you sit down in front of 3 24" displays and play any game at 5760x1200, you will see the two side monitors do not look right. Look at the crates on the left display.

The problem is that monitors act as a window or portal to whatever you are viewing and because of their dimension on your desk and how they sit at an angle spread apart, you viewing is different then having a single point of view from your main monitor, it's not as simple as stretching or increasing the view angle as it's now three different perspectives. It will look fine if you lined up your LCD's in line with your main one, but no one does this.

The sides are zoomed in and skewed and it's completely fubar when trying to play fps. I'm not sure if they addressed this and why in the world this kind of hype wasn't bad mouthed initially, but I can see the issue, maybe I'm that 1% that seems to get bugged to hell with something like this occurs.

Also, the 5760x1200 res is a trick for ati since you basically have to force the display to act as one monitor, which in turn then divy's the res to your three monitors. Your desktop will act as one display so your icons are all over the place and your task bar is running on all three displays. Annoying to setup and start for casual game play if you wanted to use 3 displays for gaming all the time. Need to have a more uniformed way of doing it.

9/28/2010 5:44:36 PM

Gotcha. I might check it out for fun.

Just about shit myself a minute ago. I accidentally installed a promise raid controller driver through Windows automatic updates thinking it was just an update to my current motherboard raid controller. Completely killed my Raid0. Luckily uninstalling it fixed the issue with a restart.

On to minecraft. I pity myself for playing this game after upgrading my computer. haha.

9/28/2010 7:54:44 PM

just got word from a friend that the gpu rendering really only helps with the pre-render or live rendering with effects in preview more than the actual final rendering and said it doesn't matter if I have nvidia or ati, just a powerful gpu to help with faster editing times and not having to constantly pre-render just to see simple edits with effects on it.

Said I'd get more boost in performance with a fast SSD scratch drive then spending the 100 or so bucks on a 480gtx. Might have to push for that idea for the holidays now.

10/4/2010 11:16:40 AM

Quote :

"Said I'd get more boost in performance with a fast SSD scratch drive then spending the 100 or so bucks on a 480gtx."

i could've told you that.

10/4/2010 12:05:50 PM

well he does video editing as a profession so I give more weight to his opinion then urs pro. still you. nohomo. :p

Still kinda interested to see the performance difference with the 5870, 480gtx and the latest fx card for video rendering or CGI work. Might play around with cgi renderings for some machinema vids.

10/4/2010 12:33:15 PM

Yea, I don't work in video... but I do work in architecture working with 3ds max, Revit, Adobe CS5 pretty much everyday. They are very similar to working with video, scratch disk is where it's at for performance.

10/4/2010 12:56:28 PM

$130 for a GTX 460 seems like a good deal

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2275457

10/4/2010 4:37:02 PM

It does. Only 768 version but that's still pretty sweet. $260 for something that performs better in games than a GTX480 is hard to beat.

10/4/2010 4:57:51 PM

alright tww. someone HAS to top this:

http://vimeo.com/15538129

That is bad ass.

10/5/2010 10:31:23 AM

cool mod, but not for a mediaPC, i like it dark when i watch movies... maybe he has a switch to kill the light...

10/5/2010 10:59:25 AM

not really that impressive, seems like a lot of waste of space.

oh in other news, 90GB SSD on sale for $140... tempted
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2277143

[Edited on October 5, 2010 at 11:28 AM. Reason : ssd]

10/5/2010 11:25:20 AM

Yes because ALL case mods MUST be space efficient. I think it's a pretty cool case mod. Especially the Bioshock theme.

Is a good deal on the ssd. Too bad I already bought mine. Grr.

10/5/2010 11:40:26 AM

Just don't look, SSD prices are just going to keep coming down.

10/5/2010 11:45:28 AM

Good point. I'll get a second 60GB for Raid0 eventually.

10/5/2010 11:47:27 AM

if the guy actually custom molded his own acrylic tank then just dumping a small media pc in a normal fish tank and submerge it in oil with a bioshock figure... then it would be a lot cooler. The effort involved really didn't that hard, maybe a few hours at most to redo.

And I remember someone who did that a few years back as a case mod like in 06 or 07? was featured in pc magazine or pc gamer as part of a large case mod competition. The whole pc was submerged with an SLI system, weighed like 60 or 70lbs with all the oil.

10/5/2010 11:49:51 AM

I'm just saying the end result with the bubbles and Bioshock figure looks cool. It's better than he didn't do the tank himself and it only took a few hours. I think that was the point which you completely missed. No one was putting it up for a competition or anything. lol.

10/5/2010 11:51:31 AM

well u made the comment "someone HAS to top this". It really isn't 'bad ass', just a neat idea done simple and it works, but saying it as though he was the first to do it is kinda dumb.

10/5/2010 3:07:20 PM

I never said it like he was the first who did it. It was just a statement because it was a cool simple idea.

10/5/2010 5:01:27 PM

interesting? maybe. Cool? its meh... Bad ass? nope

next

10/6/2010 9:16:21 AM

Ok what's something interesting you've done with a case?

10/6/2010 10:46:18 AM

I made an IED out of one with a couple of sticks of c4 one time.

10/6/2010 10:50:38 AM

^You are the not the first, that mod is very popular and way overdone.

10/6/2010 1:11:58 PM

what if I said I added some oil and gold bars in it?

10/6/2010 5:11:00 PM

Question about SLI. According to nvidia when you go into nvidia control settings and go under "set up multiple displays" the focus display should be the main display for SLI. I can't get mine to do this. It always defaults to the main display as 1 and the focus display as 2. Games obviously play on 1, not the focus display. I don't know if this is effecting performance though. Maybe just a bug? Anyone else notice this?

-k think the new drivers that came out today fixed the bug.

[Edited on October 18, 2010 at 9:12 PM. Reason : s]

10/18/2010 8:43:34 PM

Sounds like you got it fixed but I would have gave up after 5 seconds and swapped the display cables.

10/19/2010 8:59:04 AM

^did that. The focus display kept defaulting to the right display no matter what. I wanted the main and focus to be on the left. Weird.

10/19/2010 11:06:41 AM

Ok yea thats weird. Never had that happen in the last 6 years using dual monitors. Of course I hot swap the monitor plugs. Did you?

10/19/2010 2:54:47 PM

Yeah there's only a few things i don't hot swap. haha. I've been using dual/triple monitors for years it's just recently that I got an SLI setup. I just noticed that in Nvidia control panel the focus display kept defaulting to the right display no matter which monitor was the primary/main display. I don't think it effected performance though because I turned on the SLI bar indicator thing that flashes on the screen when SLI is working and it always showed up on the main display not the focus display. According to nvidia the SLI setup should be powering the focus display, which automatically always gets set to the main display yet mine had them as different. Guess it was just a bug. Seems to be fixed in the latest driver (18th).

10/19/2010 3:07:49 PM

years you say? o rly?

I've been doing it for a century... maybe even a millennium.


This TC is brought to you by JBaz

10/19/2010 6:00:41 PM