**The following is not a shameless plug, but it sure as shit reads like one.**

Why not just upgrade to their 'Pandora One' subscription plan for $36/year ($3/month)? It eliminates ads entirely, includes unlimited listening, higher-quality 192 kbps streams, and some other random stuff. Doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.

Just because you have "played games for most of your adult life" doesn't mean that becoming a game delevoper is the best career decision for you. I am also an avid gamer. And like you, I also had aspirations of someday becoming a game developer when I was younger. I started out by tinkering with mod tools and working on game maps and such.

I decided to take the next step and pursue a degree in CS. I quickly discovered that it wasn't for me. It's not that I couldn't do the work; I just found programming to be tedious. The amount of work involved to write even the simplest program was frustrating for me. I came out with a higher respect for programmers, and a degree in IT.

Damnit.. I accidentally modded you down instead of up. Must have been a libc5 rounding error. >:(

Are you saying that this is a luxury car in India??

Man, we are really screwed if your people are that easily wow'ed.

You need power and bandwidth to make one of those babies work. You don't get to power and supply enough bandwidth to work multiple cards from a single PCI slot.

This simply isn't true. Single-slot sli/xfire solutions perform equally as well as dual-slot solutions across the board.

As an example, check out the benchmarks for the ATI HD 4870 X2 vs. 2 4870's in SLI as tested by tomshardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/compare,794.html?prod%5B2113%5D=on&prod%5B2253%5D=on

Two dual GPUs in SLI/Crossfire? Maybe?

I've been waiting for someone to chime in with this argument. I was going to mention it in my original post. While you do have a valid point, let's be honest... 3- and 4-way sli/crossfire is an even smaller niche market than dual cards... like, orders of magnitude smaller.

Also, I'm not trying to discredit those solutions, but 2-way sli seems to be the sweet spot in terms of performance vs. cost. As far as gaming is concerned, even 2-way SLI is rarely worth the cost if you're not running 1920x1200 or higher resolutions. That's not to say that you won't see a benefit at 1680x1050 or lower, it's just that you're wasting a lot of money for minimal gains at those resolutions.

And looking to the future with products like Intel's larrabee, it seems to me that improved manufacturing processes and shrinking processors will only serve to further consolidate very powerful gfx solutions onto 1 card.

There are single-slot dual GPU offerings from both camps. If you actually need/want SLI/CrossFire, what's the point of running 2 cards when you can have 1?

... especially for casual gamers and kids. I have a young daughter who loves the original SMB that I downloaded through the VC, but her frustration level can get to the point where she doesn't want to play it anymore. Something like this would be nice for her and casual gamers if implemented properly. But I also think they should also insert some sort of bonus ending or perk for players who don't need to cheat to win.

Is it fair to give her an advantage when I didn't have one myself at her age? I think so. At least maybe she won't start throwing nintendo controllers across the goddamn room like I used to.

"But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said."


Ya know they's in barney when the dustcarts dont' e'en have any rubbish to pick up!

"Maybe I'm missing something but the links you posted do not show the E8600 beating the 920, 940 or 955, except where it beats a 920 by less than 1 frame per second. All that tells me is that games are not CPU bound."

The e8600 beat all of those cpu's in TFA, not the links I posted.

I know that some people hate to hear the "yea, but if you overclock part X" argument, but here goes...

You can pick up a core 2 duo E8400 wolfdale ($168@newegg) and an arctic freezer 7 pro hsf ($37), and perform a very, very modest overclock from 3.0 to 3.33ghz for a total of $205. Hell, you could probably perform this overclock with the stock cooler with no issues and save a further $37.

Now, you have the equivalent of the $270 E8600 c2d which also rates high in their gaming benchmarks (beating the phenom ii 955, i7 920, and even the i7 940 in their hl2 and crysis warhead benches, and only slightly losing to the 955 and i7 940 in farcry 2).

What's the point of all this? If I'm building a gaming PC on any kind of budget, I'm still looking at the easily overclockable and basement bargain c2d, leaving even more money for a faster gpu. I have yet to see a compelling argument for 3-4 cores for gaming. For example, look at this price/performance data:

Unreal Tournament 3 - 1680x1050
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/Unreal-Tournament-3-1680x1050,819.html
Q9650 - $325 @ newegg - 149.7 fps
E8500 - $190 @ newegg - 133.7 fps

71% increase in cost for an 11% increase in performance.

Crysis - 1680x1050
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/Crysis-1680x1050,818.html
Q9650 - $325 @ newegg - 132.4 fps
E8500 - $190 @ newegg - 134.8 fps

71% increase in cost vs. a 2% decrease in performance.

Sure, you could make the argument that future games will likely utilize 4 cores more effectively. But when? I'd wager a guess that we aren't really going to see a significant advantage to quad-core gaming for a few years yet. Just about enough time to plan the next pc upgrade!

Well I happen to agree with the OP. George Carlin said it best with his rant on 'shell shock':

"I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protest themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that. There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue. Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car. Then of course, came the war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll betcha."