I was just about to mention the Xonar Essence STX. That's what I use. Admittedly, I primarily use it for headphone use, but it should be fine with speakers. Most of the technical info, you've probably already read. As far as HDMI, your GPU should come with a small cable to connect the GPU and soundcard. Or the STX might come with it; mine didn't. If not, they're easily aquirable through ebay. Alternatively, you can use an spdif connection- either the optical or coxial- if you want surround via an external reciever. There's no analog L/R/LB/RB/C. etc. connections.

The STX really is top of the line for it's price IMO. I not only use it for listening to audio, but also creating it. The ASIO drivers are pretty good and you can work with very low latency.. if you ever find yourself doing audio production.

I loved Spyro on PS1. It was more about the atmosphere than anything, kind of like Metroid Prime. Crash was great as well. Tons of replay value.

I can't really judge until I've seen it in live in 1080p, as I find that a game can look awsome and sharp on a tiny video, but then you notice to crappy textures when you actually play it.

Still, it's OK. It's not really next-gen for PC, but it's next-gen for consoles, I'd say. At least it doesn't look like a pile of polygons. I like the effects. It makes the game seem more cinematic. The overall "effect" of the visuals is what I care about.

As far as the arguement of engines vs. devs effecting graphics: it's both obviously. Engines effect things like max poly count, texture size, number of shaders and partical effects that can be rendered. The mapping and modeling tools also effect how easy it is to create quality content. It's up to the devs to push the engine to where it can look good and still perform well.

Honestly, was the game THAT bad? Maybe the ending wasn't quite what you wanted, but what about the rest of the game? I don't believe you can judge a whole game based on the ending alone. This whole protest will only bite us gamers in that ass. Why, you ask? Because now, devs know that they DEFINITELY can't take risks without getting kicked in the nuts.

I thought the game was awsome. It was like playing in a Star Wars movie in a sense. It looked amazing, ran super-smooth and had an awsome soundtrack for every new environment. I've loved Bioware since the KOTOR days. Bioware is one of those devs that I put up there with Valve, but this whole "bad ending" trend will put an end to all that. Their next game is going to be another safe-to-profit COD knockoff, I bet.

Idk about free, but probably pretty close to it. If you have a 6150, you probably have a PCI Express slot. Just go on ebay and look for older PCI-E cards. A Geforce 8600GT can be had for under 20 bucks. That'll let you play COD4, Half-life 2, maxed out depending on the CPU. Mainly pre-2005 games. That was my first PCI-E card. It's a hellava step from that 6150. Do yourself a favour and try to invest in at least a 100 dollar card. The GTX280 comes to mind. If you were to get that, your mind would be completely blown in comparing the performance.

Edit: Don't worry about age. I was about your age when I first started cracking open old IBM computers. Installing a video card isn't hard, there's only 1 slot that it'll fit into correctly. I see that it may become a problem for you to buy things online at your age. Just ask your mom to let you buy something online.

Also, do yourself another favor; get a debit card from the bank. You'll need to open a joint account with your parent. That way, you can start buying things online NOW. I started at about 15.

It's a funny subjet really. It all depends on whether you live life praising the law or whether you're the type of person to do what it takes to benefit only you.

Personally, there's certain devs that I'd support hands down (Valve, the makers of Amnesia, etc.) and those I would prefer not to. Obviously it's hard for me to sympathize with EA if they were subject to piracy.

Generally speaking, piracy is wrong. It's stealing. At the same time; just HOW wrong it is depends on who the victim is. If we're talking about a rich tyranical king, then... well you get my drift.

I think the primary reason pirates distrubute software is because of their own justification. The reason pirates download software illegally, on the other hand is likely simply because they can. Pirating is so easy and seemingly victimless that you don't really need justification. Of course, looking at the big picture, we see things a bit differently in terms of adverse results.

-AMD Phenom 955 X4 3.2ghz OC'd to 3.7ghz air, 8gb RAM, 9800GT, Xonar Essence STX sound card, 1x 250gb HDD + 2x 750gb HDDs

-My Lenovo x61 tablet PC

-My Dell D620 laptop (albiet barely functional)

-Mom's Dell D600 laptop

Those who advocate the term "Android Media Player," I certainly agree. It's not the mainstream term, but it's much more accurate than "tablet PC."

Having said that, I believe we HAVE distinguished between them as being either "tablets" or "tablet PCs." The OP made the mistake of calling it a tablet PC and of course the seller will probably use the term also, in order to boost the percieved flexibility of the device.

Like I mentioned earlier, I owned one of those chinapads and they are by no means worthy of being called "tablet PC's." If it can run a full-fledged OS, I'll call it a tablet PC. I can barely go a day without using my Lenovo x61 convertible tablet PC. It's the most flexible device I've ever used and fellow college students always look at me in envy while they fiddle with their toyish iPads or Mac Books that are probably 3-fold the price I payed.

For encoding, It's all about CPU. Like anything, the more ghz, the better (in the same architecture at least), but since encoding utilities are often optimized in multithreading, there's a good benefit to more cores.

RAM isn't that important if you're only encoding. If you're editing, then there's no limit to how much you'll need. If you're working with uncompressed content, you'll need a fat HDD. We're talking in the terabytes if it's hours of 1080p. Though I'm sure it'll be losslessly compressed, since camcorders usually don't just dump a raw AVI. Your RAM will be pushed to the limit in a software like Aftereffects because everything is treated uncompressed. Sony Vegas doesn't need as much because it constantly re-encodes the preview as you edit.

I'd avoid sli. With sli, improved performance isn't neccesarily gauranteed.