Exactly. I am an enthusiast myself (not a benchmark or LN2 overclocking whore) and I own quite a few performance computers that I use for distributed computing purposes (Folding@Home and World Community Grid contributions). These expensive video cards can get a ton of research done and with just a few cards versus buying all small cards which also lose a lot of their resale value almost right away. Just one of these cards could easily replace four GTX 480s for Folding@Home yet use the same amount of energy as one card. It's amazing how far computers have advanced in the last 15 years, from Google running their first rack with like 40 Pentium II 300MHz CPUs to current laptops that could destroy said rack performance-wise.

NVIDIA's biggest chip (GK110 a.k.a. GTX 780/TITAN and originally Tesla) is going to be trading blows with this, so it took AMD up until now to have an answer for GTX 780/TITAN, but NVIDIA doesn't seem to have anything new in the pipeline so this could get interesting. NV simply rebranded the 600 series for the non-GK110 cards, and I'm curious what AMD will do with the rest of the Rx 2xx series if they will re-brand existing 7xxx cards or if they have new GCN 2.0 parts for us.

If anything, NVIDIA will probably have to lower the prices of their cards a bit if these take off. $400-450 for a GTX 770 is a rip when you can get a heavily discounted Radeon HD 7950 for as low as $200-230 and have comparable performance. TITAN was always a bad buy at $999, and the GTX 780 at $650 made the TITAN early adopters look rather silly.

I'd love to have a pair to replace my current 7970 + 7950 CrossfireX setup. However, I will probably wait for custom boards to come out with beefier power delivery and custom cooling solutions. Right now I have a reference (leaf blower) 7970 and a Gigabyte 7950 Windforce 3x, and the 7970 gets annoyingly loud under load.

4GB, 512-bit GDDR5 memory and supposed 2816 stream processors/48 ROPs (7970 has 2048sp/32 ROPs) means this card is going to be a beast.

Anyone else excited for these cards that are supposed to be unveiled this month? They are supposed to be more or less around GeForce GTX 780/TITAN performance. Hopefully these leaked benchmarks aren't fake, and I hope these cards launch for $600 or less.

Page is in Korean: http://udteam.tistory.com/539

http://cfile1.uf.tistory.com/image/2204E443523DE2251B7645

http://cfile5.uf.tistory.com/image/21065543523DE225196249

I'm pretty much stumped concerning the spire and the numerous places it seems to trap you if you are brushing up against it while ascending. Somehow it is fine in the normal badlands despite one glaring spot near the base on the first turn, but in V8 it seems to respond differently even though it looks completely the same, embedded blockbullets clipping and all. The spire is just a giant model (quarry_rockpile.mdl)set to non-solid and it's filled with crazy shaped tools/toolsblockbullets textured brushes to handle the collision stuff so I don't understand what can be so different about it in one map vs. another map. I'll keep working when I can but I don't think I'll have an answer for you guys for a while.

Badlands pissed me off quite a bit during the initial development wave because of the use of "power 4" displacements, which cause some havoc at compile time:

Building Physics collision data...
WARNING: Map using power 4 displacements, terrain physics cannot be compressed, map will need additional memory and CPU.
done (1) (8420340 bytes)

physics               [variable]     8420340/4194304  (200.8%) VERY FULL!

Since Valve decided to use large, high resolution displacements for the terrain instead of smaller, lower resolution (in triangles) displacements, it doesn't allow physics data to be compressed and adds roughly 20% to the map's file size. Furthermore, it seems that they stopped giving out the source files for their older stock maps after they nuked Source SDK and started shipping the tools with the games, but luckily I still have the source files from earlier this year.

Anyway, the other stuff like bball's height is easy to fix, but the spire issue, not so much. I'll try to work on it some more and if I am still unsuccessful I'll ship a version with the taller bball skybox and a few other small tweaks.

The skybox in V8's bball arena is roughly 2100 hammer units tall, which should be plenty (I'm pretty sure V7's was under 1000 if I remember right). If the current height is insufficient, I can increase it again.

EDIT: I am dumb, it's 918. I'll double it and release in the next version (hopefully really soon). I increased it in mge_dueling_v1 though, but that map was never popular so I stopped running a server with it.

I'll see if I can copy the spire off of the official Badlands and replace the one on V8. Yes, I have heard about the Spire issues, but the only information I have received about it is that people would get stuck on something, not clip through it or get the ground glitch. As some people stated, I never touched the spire from V7, and I only received a single picture showing a spot where players would get stuck, which is the top left-right twist before getting on the point.

I do apologize for the lack of updates for over half a year as my life has been dominated by random bullshit and 12-18hr days, but I'd like to resume development shortly.

The driver download is probably corrupt. As suggested, you should try re-downloading the file. Also, most if not all driver installers are probably going to be 32bit simply because there is no need for them to be 64bit, and at the least a 64bit driver package can still execute on a 32bit OS to tell you that you downloaded the wrong drivers.

Roccat Kave 5.1, which is apparently discontinued. Previous headsets were a Creative Fatal1ty and Plantronics Gamecom 377.

22

Arctic MX-4. A 20g syringe (overkill even for a few regularly maintained PCs) can be found for $20 usually and it lasts a long time.

It's nice to see another MGE server, but it seems rather pointless that my map was renamed from "mge_training_v8_beta4a" to "mge_2v2." Most MGE players should already have V8 and renaming an established map just means your players have to re-download something they probably already have. Not too big of a deal, but not everyone has fast internet or wants to download something over again.

As the owner of a Haswell system myself with a good month of tweaking the platform (owned since launch week), I'd advise you to return the processor cores and the the cache/ring component back to automatic settings. My sample requires 1.123v for both the cores and ring to operate at 4.3GHz, and improper voltage settings will almost always guarantee a 0x124 BSOD.

I'd definitely see about updating the UEFI BIOS if you can, as my board vendor (ASRock) pumped out about 5 updates within the last two months for various stability issues.

I also noticed that your RAM timings are pretty loose for 1600 MHz DDR3. Do you know what speed you purchased and its CAS latency? Sounds like it may need some manual adjustment, or for you to engage the XMP profile in your BIOS.

Couple things (just answer what you can):

Is your system automatically overclocking your processor at all? Many of these new Z87 boards automatically overclock your CPU to the highest turbo multiplier (3.9GHz for 4770Ks), though 99% of them work fine with that.
Have you installed the latest drivers for your chipset, USB 3.0 controller, etc. and not from the outdated driver CD?
Do your BSODs reference drivers e.g. nvlddmkm.sys and/or hexadecimal error codes e.g. 0x00000124?
Does this happen randomly or does doing a certain task provoke the computer to BSOD?
It might be useful to go into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer and retrieve the Event IDs from any critical system events.

Yeah, first generation i-series processors still cost a lot and get stomped at stock speeds by the newer 3xxx and 4xxx chips. I'd say build your own or purchase something decent this time around, as you'll probably be replacing just about every part in your current PC anyway.