Chiggy

Only you know what case your PC is housed in. If your case is cheapo, lacks adequate ventilation, air circulation and cooling, it is very possible your new card could turn you case into a little cooker! As for you TetsuoShima, wish you would put as much effort into answering my tech questions!

REMEMER - Many people have purchased the above card with out upgrading their PSU and are running into problems. Its not about the number of Watts your PSU can kick out its how many Amps on the 12 Volt rail you need. You need a minimum of 30A on a single 12V rail or 22A per rail on a dual rail PSU.

............and they say its always males who are the cheats TFMF ;D

Its the same in Neverwinter. They ban the CD key and if you've been a real pain the ass your IP!

My neighbour is a light user, whilst I am heavy. So you could have a point. BT charge you something like 50p extra for every GIG you download over their limit. I think the most Ive ever been over was 7. So is the answer to find a new ISP to get the speed back?

Ive noticed recently a decline in the speed of my DSL connection. I`m with an ISP in the UK called BT Broadband. My package offers up to 8MB. My question to the tech guys here is am I being duped? The reason why I ask is because my connection clearly has an IP Profile of 2000KBS whilst my next door neighbours who is on the same deal has an IP profile of 8000KBS. I have contacted the technical support and they tell me that my connection cannot exceed 2000KBPS. Well that is rubbish for two reasons I was getting a connection of 7MB up until a month ago and also more interestingly look at the down stream speed in the screen shot. I am lead to believe the IP Profile can only be changed at their end. Can anyone confirm that this is true? I did actually think it was something to do with a ill configured BRAS rate? Opinions gentlemen........

Ulysses, I used to be a well known player on MOH and because I put about 100 hours in per week I became that good that people accused me of cheating. Like you said all it takes to be good at anything in life is practice. If these people are not prepared to face being killed in a game, then they dont belong in that game. We all die, even in the real world. Yesterday was the first time I had ever loaded up servers for Counter Strike Source, I was an able player in the first game. I decided to spectate for a few rounds on one server in the UK. I watched at head shot after head shot from players. In the end I couldnt be bothered to play the actual game. It was evident that people were cheating so I came to the conclusion it was pointless playing. The games industry will probably never stop the hardware hacks, I just think they should make it harder for cheaters. Today I saw in the news ticker for BF2142 that 700 players who were stat padders and cheaters have been wiped, so maybe someone has recognised this as a real problem.

No need to feel ashamed in cheating offline mate. I cannot believe there are web sites out there advertising aimbots and the like...marketed as.........."cannot be detected by punk buster" etc. Its a wonder there any players for these games at all. Perhaps thats another advantage for console users, is that cheating on consoles is much more difficult.

I`m feeling a little depressed at the moment as it seams like every PC online game I play there are people cheating. It doesnt matter how old the game is there still are cheaters. This has encouraged me to ask myself why bother to play online anymore? Neverwinter Nights has for a long time been my favourite games because on some servers it uses a vault system which validates players characters to ensure that they arent hacked. I put almost 2 years into one server and it was found by the owner that the entrusted Dungeon Masters were cheating! So how can I win? Well the answer is simple, I couldnt! Most of the cheats Ive found to frequent FPS games, counter strike and battlefield games. Ever wondered how some guy keeps on killing you no matter how well you hide? Chances are hes cheating. What exactly are the motivations of these people? Perhaps they need to feel important somewhere? To be honest what is there to gain for me, an honest gamer if I`m getting my butt kicked by a load of lame hackers? Opinions please..........

Its a Battlefield game. Part FPS, part sim, part objective game. Patch 2 is soon to be released then we will have the Hoth map and many more vehicles. Ive been playing this mod a lot lately its a shame there dont appear to be many players partly because no one seams to know about it. One great thing about Mods is that you dont get a lot of idiot gamers on them team killing etc as it takes some intelligence to get the mod running. Drop me a pm if you have trouble. Look out for me, I am OllyTheOctopus.

Red Dwarf has returned to Channel 19 on Freeview. I caught this weeks episode; the wild west virtual reality armageddon virus. Great stuff. The BBC should make more episodes. Wednesday nights - 9:00pm - Series VI - Miss it and be a smeg head.

Glad to see you were successful in changing your grades TFMF. I suppose thats one way to get into uni BAH. I dont mean to hi jack but Ive forgotten the password on my girlfriends email account can anyone help? Theres is a very good reason why I dont reply to threads of this ilk. I see no problem with your replies Queen Spock.

Is she for sale? I will open the bidding at 10 bars of gold pressed latinum.

I had to give my trusty PIII died yesterday. The poor thing was suffered with a condition called mobo degeneration. After replacing all components e.g. RAM, CPU and HD I finally gave up and had to end this poor machines suffering. The Tiny was purchased in March 2000 and lead a long and happy life only having one graphics card upgrade in its life. I spent many happy hours connected to the internet engaging in battles of counter strike and neverwinter nights whilst also assisting me in my every day office activities. Sadly as time progressed 'the Tiny' became forgetful, often letting important operating system files become corrupted and thus no longer accessible, much to the frustration of its operator who spent a lot of his time repairing files. A decision had to made made by the user, was it humane to keep this PC alive? It was clear the motherboard was suffering from degeneration, a condition which in later years effects all electrical components. The hardware manufacturer only intended the mobo to complete a certain number of on/off operations and this Tiny had exceeded the manufactuerers expectations. Sadly it was deamed by the user that it would cost too much money and time to replace the heart of this PC with a new MS 6156 motherboard. There had been many sightings of the Tiny's brother and sisters on eBay but most likely they were also suffering from the same degenerative condition. The funeral will take place early next week at the users local waste recovery establishment. RIP my Tiny...my friend. Has anyone else got a story of the death of their ever faithful friend they would like to share?

TetsuoShima dear boy, the reason why I know nothing of the 8800 GT is because this card is not sold by many of UK's leading hardware retailers. e.g. ebuyer, yoyotech. I am only out of date as far as what is actually being sold. I did manage to find the NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GT OC for sale at scan its seamed a little expensive at £181.98 Inc VAT. Good luck if you can pick it up for 250 Dollars. As for the dates of OEM's, thats the official page from MS its also the date printed in PC magazines. I dont think I could change your mind if I posted actual copies of the articles out of those magazines.

In regards XP I was refering to the sale of OEM's, system builders dont use anything else. 8800 series is as follows: 8800GTS 320MB 8800GTS 640MB 8800 GTX 8800 Ultra It is worth mentioning that there are two 8800GT cards. The 320MB and the 640MB. Currently there is a 50 pounds price difference between the two. The 640MB will cost you around 240 pounds which is way out of your budget. If you system belonged to me to be honest I wouldnt want to upgrade to one of the above cards as only max potential will be achieved with a far quicker hardware. Your Mobo, CPU, RAM, HD are all going to produce bottlenecks.

Heres another ill concieved idea Ive just had........... advanced screenings of Razor in European cinemas not just in the USA. http://www.battlestarevent.com/ What do you think?

I dont have an opinion on this, I put it down to individuals who are inexperienced in using chat venues.

Its about time the BBC started to show adverts like ITV. All their problems would be solved and we would see more Sc-Fi.

This is an age old arguement. To play the games as the developers intended one must invest the 350. Games run on low-medium detail are not how the developers intended them to be run where as with consoles you get the max detail as standard. Also I dont see the cost of PC games included in your listing. No longer can games be downloaded for free. Most modern games now require online registration, like BF2142 etc. I do agree that console gamesa cost a lot more. £10 for STALKER brand new is a great deal.

Good point, although I would of said nearer 350 for a graphics card upgrade.

Sorry to be annoying....you didnt total the cost of broadband to enable online play, thats 18 pounds per month for me. Console subscription works out a lot cheaper in that respect. The power consumption of PC Vs a gamesa console also has to be taken into account. I do believe the average gamers PC consumes more power than a games console.

Here is the MS Life Cycle page with OEM's. The date has been extended to July 2008. Please believe me TetsuoShima! http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx

What is true is that OEM's for XP will no longer be on sale after Jan 2008. Sorry but your wrong about that. I would suggest you pick up a copy of a November edition of a PC rag. For those of you who are in the UK, page 103 of CustomPC. As for Vista never being as big as XP, I remember when people in the industry were saying that about XP when everyone was on W2K.

Like it or not XP OEM's will soon no longer available with new machines. This is a confirmed fact. Nice way of pushing DX 10 onto us :-) Funny you should mention the X-Box 360..............currenly Games for Windows Live is only supported by Vista. MS 'say' they will release a XP version later this year. DX 10 offers significant graphical improvements on games like Hellgate, Lost Planet, Bioshock, COH blah blah blah. Still only a handful of games I admit but if you are a hardcore gamer and want the best rig, DX 10 is where its at even now. There may not be many incentives right now for Vista and DX 10 upgrades but lets see what SP1 brings. I`m afraid I`m one of those poeple that when it comes to spending one hundred pounds I would rather put that money into a long term investment rather than a short term. Buying twice is never a very attractive thought to have in your mind when your shelling out your hard earned cash.