I've been building my own and friends PCs for years and one headache I constantly deal with is terrible website performance from various motherboard manufacturers. Searching for and downloading drivers is a real headache because the sites are so slow. Right now I am downloading drivers from Gigabyte at less than 4k/sec and am on my 3rd try for a 30MB file that has stalled during download two times. In the past, I've used Abit and Asus motherboards and have had similar experience when their sites are even up.

Anyone's motherboard have a good website?

suck it up, doom 3 isnt scary at allREforever101

Obviously there is nothing to be "really" scared about in Doom 3 or any other video game (or movie, or book...). Some people have the imagination and ability to immerse themselves in fictional content enough to be scared or sad or angry. Other people don't and will never get as full an experience out of a game as the imagineers.

Another consideration is CPU. For around the same money you could pick up a dual core E6850 running at 3.0GHz versus your quad core Q6600 running at 2.4GHz.

Most games are not written multi-threaded and those that claim to support multiple cores don't shown huge preformance gains at this time. You get a good boost from the second core because one core can run the OS and your malware on one and the game gets a core to itself. Adding more cores, especially at the cost of clock speed, won't help most games. If your primary interest is running games well consider a faster 2x core for the same money.

Yep it's a good game for stuff leaping out of the shadows at ya. My recomendation is to play it in small doses. After a while I got the rythm of the boobie traps and expected most of them. "If I pick up this item someone is gonna spawn behind me..." "when I step through this door someone is gonna drop from the ceiling..."

Also once I got further in the game my irritation about the overuse of darkness rose to a high enough level that it overshadow my nervousness.

I think Doom 3 is one of many games that are still being written by technologists, not by story tellers. Alfred Hitchcock said that there is a pattern to scaring an audience. You build up tension, you scare them, then you let them off the hook for a while. If you don't give the audience the cool down period the experience stops being fun. Highly refined games like Half-Life 2 understand this and do things like alternate intense combat sequences with safe(r) puzzle solving sequences. Games written by technological wizards, but story telling newbs, tend to run more: tension - tension - tension - BOO! - tension - tension - tension - BOO!

The reason you don't see a great deal of difference is because DX10 doesn't really effect a snapshot of a game as much as it effects the game itself(what really matters). Making the game feel much more realistic.irelevent

ROFL. DX10 has wildly better graphics... but not in ways you can SEE. I guess I better dig out Leisure Suit Larry. That's the only one of my games I can imagine wanting to "feel" more realistic.

I'm not trying to pick on you Irelevent. Just lots of "I Love Vista" posts, even from MS, don't seem to make much sense when you think them through. Makes me smile.

Vista SP1 is going to use Windows Server 2008 Kernal, so it will be faster.magicalclick

Vista SP1 will not make any significant boosts to performance. Check this article. MS has already responded to the benchmarks saying they were not expecting or claiming large performance improvements. XP will always be faster than Vista, just like DOS was faster than Windows.

In a year or two they will start releasing games that require DX10 and Vista (they won't run at all on XP) and we will all have to upgrade. By that time hardware will have moved along to where the performance difference between XP and won't be that big a deal.

[SPOILERS]

While the main point of the credits song "Still Alive" is that GLaDOS is still alive, some of the lyrics indicate the player is also:

go ahead and leave me
I think I prefer to stay inside
maybe you'll find someone else to help you
maybe black mesa...

As far as the cake goes there was a great story in an interview with one of Portal's writers. He said they were having an initial meeting about what the story line of the game should be and they asked themselves "What philosophy or philosophical school should the theme of the game be based on?" After about 10 minutes of sitting there starring at each other someone said, "A lot of people like cake."

While there are some valid reasons to hold off switching to Vista, security ain't one of them. Vista was built from the ground up considering security better than NT based OSs like XP. In fact one common complaint about Vista is that security is overdone and (by default) you're asked to review and approve too many activities.

Things like security. bugs, and drivers are largely caught up by this point. As the previous poster said you're not likely to run into any more trouble running Vista than XP these days with current applications.

The two still valid reasons to stick with XP:

1. XP runs significantly faster than Vista on identical hardware. Vista can do DX10 which XP can't so its up to you whether frame rate or eye candy is you're priority.

2. There are some old games and legacy apps that won't run under Vista. If you have some old favorites you can't let go, do a little research before switching OSs.

I think it's important to acknowlege that the point of Yahtzee's game reviews is to be funny and entertaining. It's not to review video games. If you start analyzing the fairness, or accuracy, or thoroughness of Yahtzee's reviews you are missing the point. They are there for fun. We laugh because they point out the stupidity in gaming, our own stupidity in playing games, and because he's obnoxious and swears a lot in an english accent which we associate with reserved politeness.

Is it entertaining? Absolutely. Are they good game reviews? Hell no.