A Blithering Div

It was but from what I understand, Noctua takes the crown now adays, but at that price, spend a bit more and get a corsair Hydro series.

Heat is the enemy, but voltages are far, far more dangerous. Also, a coolermaster EVO is relatively cheap ($30 or so) and effective. When you go to get a cooler, be sure it fits in your case. When I had the EVO on my phenom I had to take a door fan off.

As it's a new rig, I don't blame ya. But its really not as risky as people make it out to be. Production rigs however.... That's a different story.

I doubt he'll even have to tweak the voltages to hit 3.8GHz on it. The only time beastly cooling system come into play is when you aim for the max OC. As long as you don't run at ridiculous voltages it'll last until the next upgrade.

Yeah, Richland is nothing more than a tick for Trinity. It really only improved the CPU turbo to make the mobile parts better. Outside of that, you're paying a premium for a non existent advantage.

Well actually at the $200 price point, Intel is superior. There is simply no way I can tell someone with a straight face to buy a CPU on an aging obsolete socket that runs hot. At your price point, there isn't much of a compelling product from Intel. The Pentium is better than the 370k but at that point you're at $70 and the 750k is around the same price and gives you better performance.

To address point A: They didn't although they probably reduced in core latencies substantially as GloFo's 28nm process isn't quite up to snuff to maintain ~4GHz clockspeeds. It's not even the FPU so much as it is the scheduler. Adding another one would greatly improve IPC. http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7507/KaveriConfig.jpg Point B: They only time I tell people to go intel is when they're either A. not interested in overclocking a budget rig or B. have $200 or more to spend on the CPU.

Thing is, you won't hit 70-100 in minecraft unless the draw distance is as low as you can get it. I had a Phenom II x4 @ 3.6GHz that managed ~100 fps and that CPU is about on par with an FX 4300. Granted the draw distance was "far" but my point still stands. And having the extra FPU available will make a difference in everything.

Yes but what I am telling you is that the extra module will give you significantly better performance in every single area. As in the Athlon x4 is the better choice by a mile especially for minecraft. This boils down to the Piledriver architecture. See, when AMD was designing their new cores, they decided to share an FPU between 2 integer units. This FPU can do 2 128 bit floats at a time but it only has one FPU scheduler, so rather than behave like a dual core in the case of the 370k, it behaves more like a single core with some hardware hyperthreading.

These are the closest benchmarks I could find for the 370k: The A4-5300 http://www.techspot.com/review/681-amd-a10-6800k-a4-4000/page4.html Notice the Deficit between it and the G2020. You're gonna want the extra module.

Do you need a monitor and/or keyboard/mouse? Don't forget you'll need to purchase a copy of windows as well. As for the CPU, it really depends. I would personally go with a haswell i series (socket 1150) as A. I have one and know its performance pretty well and B. Intel CPUs offer very strong single thread performance and pretty good multithreaded as well. This allows for higher framerates in more games. Now, AMD's FX series does very well in multithreaded scenarios and in some cases manages to out edge an i7 and it does particularly well in battlefield 4, however its single threaded performance is rubbish at best and in games like Starcraft 2 or Dirt 3, it tends to perform quite dismally. Anandtech's benchmarks should help you decide what exactly you're looking for. When it comes to graphics cards. It's kind of personal preference unless you plan on using some form of Linux (AMD's catalyst is still rubbish). Outside of that x60 or above on the nvidia side or 7870 or above (270x or higher) on the AMD side will give you pretty good performance.

The CPU is very weak. It doesn't even come close to a Pentium dual core. If you insist on going with AMD, you want at least the Athlon x4 750k. Slightly lower clocks but the extra module will help a lot. Outside of that, looks decent.

Babies are vile, disgusting, ugly messes of cells. It's all "WAAAAAH! ALL MY NEEDS ARE MET! WAAAH!" The less babies there are, the less traffic I'll have to deal with. I have a niece as well that I will apparently *have* to hold. Luckily for me, all my pants have pockets. Chalk up another hate vote.

No I haven't. Access to which requires the use of Tor and I'm way to lazy for that. Though from what I understand, 4chan's /b/ doesn't hold much of a candle to the dark web.

Shannon Nyquist applies to digital audio, not video. The theorem states that to accurately reconstruct a digitally sampled signal, you need twice as many samples as the highest playback frequency. Digital video is not stored in the same manner as digital audio and is far more complex. I recommend watching this video: http://www.xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml

From what I've read, on the nVidia side you want a 760 or higher. On the AMD side, you want the R270 or higher. However, make sure your power supply can handle it. Edit: Also make sure your case will fit the card. A lot of new cards are fairly long and take up two slots: one for the PCIe and another for ventilation. Edit 2: You don't need to reinstall windows. You will however need to uninstall your current graphics drivers and install new ones.

In terms of operating systems: Linux, then trailing by a few miles is windows. Trailing by a few AU is OS X. Linux actually respects the user and allows me do to as I please. Its not perfect. Not by a long shot, but it has gotten significantly better over the years. Windows and OS X have only continued the tradition of abstracting as much of the under-the-hood components from the user as possible. Mobile is the same story but throw android in there as well. I have a Nexus 4 with android 4.3. It isn't that good. Conversely Maemo, a long dead mobile OS still holds its own. I've yet to try ubuntu phone or firefox OS or even tizen as I'm waiting for them to mature a bit more so I don't brick my Nexus 4 but I can't wait to try them. On the hardware side: Intel and nVidia. Sorry but their software stacks are eons ahead of what AMD is producing. "BUT MANTLEZ AND NEXT GEN CONZOLEZ" you shriek at me. Ok, so woefully underpowered consoles and an API scheme that has been tried before by various and now defunct/irrelevant companies such as S3 and 3dfx are the future? As a hardware enthusiast I'm looking forward to Kaveri but AMD isn't that relevant anymore as it is. I don't think for a second Mantle is the answer to AMDs issues. Instead, what they should be doing is improving their catalyst driver especially under Linux and oh i don't know, help optimize OpenGL. For mobile handsets: None. They're all locked down pieces of rubbish. The same mostly rings true for tablets. There's the Pengpod but its a bit pricey for the hardware. Consoles: None. I have a PC.

After a 14 year hiatus from the series in its entirety, I got Pokemon Y. The last game I played was red so the jump from gen 1 to 6 is not so much large as more or less consisting of "WTF is this thing?" I've made it a bit past the 3rd gym thus far so I'd like to put my thoughts in you. First, the negatives as this for once is going to be the shortest. There's a bit too much carry over from ye olden days. I understand it may be due to balance but there's no reason to only have 4 moves available at a time or only hold 6 pokemon in a bag that can seemingly carry an infinite number of other items. The battle music isn't that great either. Similar structure to the chip tune but its not exactly tension building. These are just a few drops of lemon juice on an otherwise quite tasty pumpkin pie. Maybe its just some nostalgia coming up but this game is quite fun. Pokecenters have the store in them so there's no need to hunt down a store. Random trainers are scattered throughout to heal your pokemon so treks back to said center aren't always necessary. I especially like the super training. It's almost as if they realized that its best to actually have some control over stats in an RPG. The Exp. Share is the best item since rare candy. I also like that they got rid of PC item storage. So now I can just carry everything thus far and not waste time at the pokecenter like in old country. It appears 14 years of tweaking and refinement have paid off. One of my friends is irked about mega evolution but I don't understand it. In a game that has critical hits that can down equally level pokemon that aren't weak to the attack I don't think its that big of a deal and welcome it as an equalizer of sorts. On a tangently related note, I find myself paying more attention to the story. As in there actually is one now. From what I remember of red it was document every pokemon in the game, catch said pokemon (not missingno. otherwise you'll be missing a psyduck among other things) and get all eight badges. Now, there's a point to the quest. Say what you want about mega evolution but I think it gives going about the game more purpose rather than catching them all and filling a pokedex. I also find myself considering the options more. SPOILER: I got to the point where you can obtain a Lucario and I thought about it for a second. Yes, sure it may have wanted to tag along but what about the trainer? Would it miss her and vice versa? What happens if I say no? Does it get cross and become a nightmare later? I did take it along for the ride but there was some thinking behind it. All and all I'm pleasently surprised at how much I enjoy this game. Same basic concepts but yet it still holds its charm. I even more surprised that 14 years later I hesitated for a few levels when it came to evolving Pikachu. It was only like 2 or 3... Alright it was more like 7 but that's not the point. The point is karate chop is bullshit.

I subscribed to several space related subreddits, help kickstart arkyd, donated to the planetary society and do own my own telescope. It's a ten inch dobsonian with the good ol' telrad sight. I haven't used it much though as new moons on the weekend don't happen often. However, I have gotten an excellent view of Saturn, its rings and several moons with the dob along with a few galaxies, globular and open clusters, and of course the moon. Related note: Bill Nye hosts a web series on the Juno mission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynzfjgtdius

Well, I've successfully updated my PC over this summer. So now I'm rocking an i7 4770k, 16 GB of DDR3 1866 RAM stuffed on a Gigabyte Z87-HD3 which I do NOT recommend. I've had to update the UEFI just to get it stable with 16 gigs of RAM and now my "overclocking" capabilites have went from actually being able to overclock to underclocking while overvolting. Still running a Raedon 7870. But now I get to bathe in the obfuscated glory that is Windows 8.1 due to AMD catalyst being rubbish under Linux. Still, beats the crap out of my old Phenom II x4.

If you're hitting 100 C on stock cooling something is wrong with your setup. I don't think new thermal paste will make much of a difference unless the old OEM stuff is dry. Is the heatsink seated properly?

I play it. Its good and more updates will come soon I hope. Problem is I'm still kinda rubbish at it because I like to brute force my way to places. That tends to use a lot of fuel which I counter with more solid rocket boosters. I did make it to the Mun a few times when it was far easier to land on it. I also made it to Duna once but neglected the thin atmosphere so it was more of a suicide mission. So if you're aiming at Duna either put a crap ton of chutes on your pod or pack enough fuel for retro burn (or in my case, don't think the fuel left over is superfluous and jettison it). I also made it to Jool once trying to make it to Duna and found out you can't land on Jool and the game will freak the fuzz out if you try. I now have the fusion engine mod and my life is much easier.