Check out his Bioshock review, stating the difficulty comparisons, the stuff cut out, did gamespot mention that? Did IGN? Kez1984

But the Bioshock "review" just supports my point, actually more than the Oblivion one. That video is funny as hell and his slams on Bioshock are completely accurate. But he spends the whole video riffing on Bioshocks faults. Accurate? yep. Fair? sure. Does it give a complete picture of the quality or value of the game? No it does not.

He starts that video by admitting as much. He likes the game, but he's gonna riff on its issues for our entertainment. And actually thats enough reason for me to shut up. He's already pointed out himself that his videos are not about how good or bad the games are. They are about long entertaining riffs on games flaws. I have nothing to add.

Yahtzee's review of Oblivion is the case in point of why he is a brilliant humorist, but he's not a real game reviewer. He ragged on Oblivion for the entire "review" and Oblivion is an execptional game. Not perfect, not by a longshot. But very good.

Is that video funny? Yes very funny. Does it pick on things Oblivion deserved to be picked on for? OHHH yes, absolutely. Does it give someone who knows nothing about Oblivion a fair overview of the games strengths and weaknesses. Absolutely not.

Yahtzee's reviews are stand up comedy for gamers. His insightful slams on games are a hoot for people who have played the games. He's no help for the virgins. He's funny, insightful, I love his videos.

But, he's not a game reviewer.

I wonder how much the sales actually are? They seem to have been pretty shy about tossing out actual numbers versus saying 'percent improvements' or 'very successful'... they've been completely mum about that stuff. :(Makari

Enough to keep making the games they want to make at the pace they want and maintaining their standards of quality. Valve is privately held and like most privately held companies have no legal requirement to share books and so don't. Let's keep our fingers crossed that Valve stays private forever. Publicly owned companies tend to make decisions to please the stock market in short term, instead of decisions to please their customers over the long term. Example: Electronic Arts.

I hate the fact that you need the internet in order to install single player games from Valve. The internet should be seen as an option in order to take advantage of online play, not as a requirement just to get it installed. Falconoffury

I hate the fact that I have to stick a CD in the drive on my non Steam games. DRM is not likely to go away so might as well have the least obtrusive and somewhat effective version.

If you are looking at this as a career you probably want to check out A+ Certification. It's the industry standard cert for hardware and OS knowledge. There are many course oriented toward getting you ready to pass the certification exam. For example you could check out your local community colleges.

If what you want is to build your own gaming PC, I second the suggestions above. You definitely don't need a cert for that.

To get your best performance/dollar, yes a dual core processor is required. CPUs manufacturers have hit a dead end with clock speed so in order to get more performance out of newer CPUs they have decided to add more cores. You get a huge performance bump going to a second core because you can run your OS and all your malware (my definition of malware is anything that steals CPU cycles from my games) on one core and your game gets an entire core to itself.

As others have said, in order to get a benefit from more than 2 cores the game must be specifically written to take advantage of it.

You are right that earlier dual CPUs provided questionable benefit to gaming and had stability issues. Like SLI video of today it was more for the technical challenge and bragging rights. There really was not any consistant measurable benefit that justified the cost, work, or aggravation to the mere casual gamer.

There's a big difference between dual CPUs and dual cores though. 1. Dual cores are in a single CPU component with one interface to the motherboard. The motherboard doesn't have to understand or deal with threading logic. Threading decisions are made inside the CPU. 2. Multiple cores have quickly become the standard (multiple CPUs in desktops were rare) so the bugs with OSs are discovered far more quickly and given far higher priority.

I am pretty sure AOC doesn't support Quad cores.zaku101

This is the truth and was the point of my OP. But it seems to imply that AoC is an exception. It's not. Games that actually use multiple cores are the rare ones. I have yet to see one that does more than say "supports quad core" on the box and actually benchmarks better.

If Age of Conan hasn't done this (new game, big development team and budget, ambitious expectations from day one, released for serious gaming hardware only) then it's not an easy nut to crack.

I'm not saying it will never happen. It'd be foolish to say that about any technological challenge. Just saying 2007 wasn't the year that hurdle was cleared and 2008 ain't looking like it either.

Benchmarks from September 2007. Note that quad cores do well on office apps and theoretical benchmarking tools, but not in actual games.

Another analysis from May 2008. Still true.

If your interested in a long technical article about the challenges coding for multiple threads, check this one. Take aways for gamers:

A. Games don't easily lend themselves to seperate threads because events (like graphics, and AI, and collisions, and physics) are dependant on each other and have to be precisely syncronized.

B. Developers have been writing single threaded code for so long and getting free performance boosts from better and better hardware. There has been little need for them to learn to write more efficient programs. Now CPUs are no longer getting faster they are getting more and more cores and programmers have to relearn how to code.

Most modern video cards and monitors have both. Odds are you don't have to choose until you are standing at your computer deciding what to hook up.

The 15 pin VGA jack is an analog signal. Your video card produces a screen image in a digital format in memory. To send that image across a VGA cable it has to convert to an analog signal. CRT monitors needed that analog signal to paint the screen. LCD monitors need digital data to render a screen so if it gets analog signal from the cable it has to convert it back before using it.

For this reason the DVI cable is (theoretically) more efficient and likely provides a marginally better image. You are sending the actual usable digital version of the screen image vs encoding and decoding it.

That said the encoding/decoding process is so fast it is insignificant compared to the time taken to render a screen on the video card and the monitors max refresh rate. So really you're not likely to see any actual performance improvement moving from VGA to DVI cable.

This last page of Age of Conan hardware guide shows a CPU comparison and I was a little suprised to see the E8400 (Dual Core 3Ghz) tie the QX9650 (Quad Core 3.0Ghz) on the FPS test in the city. The article explicity states that these in city benchmarks are CPU bound, varying the video cards did not change the numbers.

I'm suprise because the Quad CPU is the Extreme gaming version (biggest differences are three times as much L2 on CPU cache 4MB vs 12MB and Extreme friendlier to overclocking) and because AoC went though its final stages of development while multi-core systems were the standard. This seems like further evidence that games are still difficult problems to break up into threadable tasks that don't depend on each other.

Looks like the smart advice from last year still stands. If you have X dollars to spend on a CPU and your primary purpose is gaming, put the money toward a faster dual core CPU, not a lower clock speed quad core. If money's no object go for the quad but remember that clock speed is still the defining requirement for games.