DCK

Going down in budget: Best: £160 -Samsung SyncMaster SM206BW - I'm typing this on its predecessor. Samsungs own. Good: £140 - LG L204WT - My brother has the 19" version. It's a great monitor, but the Samsung definetely beats it. Fitting to budget:£125 - Acer X201W - Don't know much about it, but it seems to have the best stats within budget. It has 1680x1050 resolution, and a reasonable response time. It doesn't have DVI though. If you have a (CRT?) monitor now, you might want to put up with it for a while and save up for the Samsung. It's not incredibly much more money, and a good monitor like this'll outlive your PC and be useful and gorgeous for several years.

If the Wii keeps up 50% of its current selling rate, there's no way it's going to happen. The Wii is a console capable enough, but it's not getting used in any way that we know of yet.

What is the point of this?!

Yeah, this owns! Nice one admins

So does that mean that Valve's Orange Box porting team is going to develop for Wii? The Orange Box team?

Yeah it is, but what does that have to do with anything? Are you satisfied with any reason to flame Nintendo? You're collectively wrong here, get your facts straight.

It is not the freaking translation time that's causing this. We've been over this too many times. Brawl is the first dual-layered Wii game and they can't produce enough before Summer. And they're not going to release the game in Summer.

I wish some feminists could remember that definition sometimes. And what equal means, too.

But, after AMD's price cut last week, the 3870 is the same price as the 9600GT, which is what you were referring to in the first place. But it's grossly over budget, it's like 110 quid now.

Hey hey now, I said nearly impossible. I didn't rule it out, chances are really slim though. The fact that we can't produce it ourselves is a strong indication of the difficulty in nature, as synthesis is an optimised process, very effective on small molecules. Chances of it happening are at least many times smaller than carbon biology. I don't see how I couldn't state anything about its probability as that's the way science works - experimental data is applied to the real world and one says "this probably works that way with a certain degree of certainty". In fact, if I recall correctly my chemistry teacher told my class once silicon atoms couldn't form chains higher than some number (around 10) because the atom's bigger size got in the way of its own molecular structure. Damn, somebody used the ignorance thing on me

I don't think that men are women are equal. I only think they should be treated equally. Women being underpaid is one of the most ridicilous things in modern society. Men and women have different strengths and weaknesses that, most of the time, perfectly complement each other. They are very equal in status, but too often this "equality" is taken out of context. Too many feminists are too extreme. A group of feminists in the Netherlands once tried to pass a law that made men and women share exactly the same amount of time taking care of children. This because "men and women" are equal. They're not - they should be treated equally, not made equal through this. If a woman wants to take care of her children, she should be able to. Likewise, a man should be able to take care of his kids when he needs to; no need to be forcing on any timesharing. Treating men and women as perfectly equal misses the point entirely - the differences between men and women make life a little prettier

It appears some shops have the 3650 in stock already, at least one here in the Netherlands. You should be able to find one in the UK, too. Make sure you get the version with 512MBs of GDDR3 memory. There's a lot on the loose with GDDR2 memory, but they will perform poorly.

I'll make a vid when I get bored tomorrow

Seriously, don't worry about DirectX 10.1, it's some really (really) minor features that were optional implementations in DirectX 10.0 already. No game will require you to have DirectX 10.1 when every game still supports DirectX 9.0c for Windows XP support. Also, the new Radeons should be out in the coming two weeks already, so it's not much of a wait.

Yeah, although silicon is the only common element that bonds four times besides carbon, apparently it doesn't support large structures of atoms that well. If it's really hard to synthesize the silicon equivalent of hexane already, it's probably near impossible for self-replicating molecules to develop the silicon equivalent of DNA.

They're identical, except for these things: - They use a smaller manufacturing process that makes them cooler and suck less power. - All 3000 series cards support DirectX 10.1 instead of DirectX 10.0 in the 2000 series (doesn't matter in games, especially if you run XP) - All 3000 series cards now have a chip that supports hardware acceleration of HD movies, significantly lowering CPU usage. I believe only the 2600 had that before. The 3800s are about 10-20% faster than the 2900 was, and the 3650 is only like 2% faster than the 2600, but it does have its advantages.

That's a real exaggeration here, the 3870 is priced the same and performs better in the majority of the games. The 9600GT just wins by bigger margins, evidence that nVidia tweaked them specifically for those games (the big hitters like CoD 4), and those are the games in which the GeForce 8 cards do relatively better, too. It does have great overclocking potential though.

I don't know, I'm not a marketing expert, but I imagine a cold winter month will make games sell better than the Spring/Summer party time. If it would've been possible to release Brawl here earlier, I trust they would've done it, but I guess they couldn't bring up the production. Dissappointing, really. Iwata took his words about Brawl a launch title back, and they were taken out of context in the first place really. But yeah, this should've been a Q4 2007 title, and it's Q3 2008 now. I could've somehow lived with that if it was like that worldwide, but this is just plain wrong.

The first star in the Junk Galaxy was amazing! I had the classic game moment feeling, so awesome.

The Radeon 3650/70 should be a slightly better alternative in the near future for around the same money. It's reported to be going to have a 512 MB version for $99, so that's around two pounds.

Even though it's a Dell, and Dells suck bad due to various reasons, it's such a good value that it's recommendable. And Dell screens seem to have a better name than Acers but I can't be certain about that. Also, if you want to keep on gaming for a while I wouldn't recommend demanding your computer to keep on pushing high resolution graphics for 20" screens. I know for a fact that the Radeon HD3850 256 MB edition can run Call of Duty 4 and Bioshock maxed out on a 19" (1440x900 resolution). Your PC is better than that PC though, and the 512 MB edition is a bit faster too - but I wouldn't push it. As an alternative for the 3850 you could consider the 3870 and 9600GT for 20 quids more. They perform roughly equally, around 15-20% better than the 3850.

That really can't be the reason, it means they must've paid thousands of employees to do cack over the last few months. Brawl is just such a big hit that they're not going to be releasing it in low-selling periods like late Spring and Summer.

Judging Earth, humanoids are pretty succesful...

That is one weird rock though! None of the other rocks on Mars photos look shaped like that, probably because there's only wind erosion.

This is freaking terrible. I can play the NTSC version due to some illegal stuff in my Wii (so I'll be playing it in two weeks...), but Nintendo is really screwing over Europe here. Of course it's sales strategy. The European version probably couldn't come out before May due to the priority of the US and Japanese versions, and they wouldn't release this game in summer due to general worse sales. Hence fall. Thanks for the worst case scenario, Nintendo. Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit just don't compensate enough.