pio

Show me where you can buy Office Premium, Outlook, and Onedrive. Go ahead. I'll wait. And yes, I have shown you evidence, you're just not looking at it. I'm done with this conversation. Clearly you can't see other people's point of view. Personally, I'm fine with having the OPTION for these things. So long as it stays an option. But its not, and it hasn't been for a while.

Dude....they're already doing it. I showed you that earlier with office. Here, let's look at game pass. What all items do you NOT get unless you pay for the "Game Pass Ultimate"? Xbox Game Pass Ultimate — Ultimate 1 Month | Xbox WWW.XBOX.COM You keep saying that they're not doing it yet, but they ARE. When I go and buy a new game title today, I also have to buy day one DLC, and other nonsense just to get the full experience. Some games are already rolling out regular DLC or some other form of subscription model to get you to pay more for the game you've already paid for. With gamepass, its turned into a monthly subscription. How long until that's the norm? It's painfully obvious to ANYONE who's been in the PC industry for years that this is where its headed, especially when these companies are flat out saying it in press releases. I just....I can't even argue with you when you don't even read what I'm telling you, and showing you directly from the company themselves. It has nothing to do with how big the company is, it has to do with where they see the future going. I could care less if its Microsoft, EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Google, whoever. When I pay good money for something, I expect a product in return. Period. And on top of that, I expect the FULL product that I paid for.

You mean like how GTA V "wasn't exclusive" to consoles? Or did you forget that PC gamers didn't get it for over a YEAR later. And it was BROKEN on PC for years after that. Face it bro, we have valid complaints here about this aquisition. It's NOT a good thing for one company to own so many game companies. They're going to ruin those companies further than they already were.

You should head over to the CPUz bench competition we're doing for fun. Looks like a fantastic rig and setup! Your overall cable management makes me jealous. My "mid life crisis" seemed to manifest in me buying a bunch of old junk. You went the opposite route. Touche. Any plans on going bigger on the monitors? That seems to be about the only thing really "lacking" in your setup there, and even then that's just a personal preference anyway. 10/10 rig there, decent to great audio, great keyboard, great cable management, I mean you're really not leaving us much to critique here.

It kind of depends on the scoring criteria I'd think. Your i5 3337u there is modern enough and has enough modern instruction sets to do just about anything you'd want it to still. Slowly, yes.....but it'd do it. The QX6850, while yeah it has high raw CPU power still (for its age), it's lacking instruction sets. There's some games it won't play, despite it still being a half decent CPU even today (ironically). It doesn't even have AVX, whereas yours does. If we're scoring based off the benchmark numbers, then yes you'd be correct. The QX6850 is a pretty strong CPU, and yes....its faster than stuff on the "fast" board. Personally, I've got CPU's from Socket A up through AM4 (AMD, because I didn't feel like doing Intel builds too). I consider my FX and AM4 builds "modern", but I wouldn't call my Thuban, Phenom, or Deneb CPU's modern at all even though they're multi core and still all capable. Personally, I'd say it shows just how freaking awesome the Core 2 Quad series really were back in the day. My 2 cents. He's beating my Thuban with that QX6850, and I have 2 more cores and a newer CPU, and 100MHz clock speed advantage. And he's wiping the floor with my Thuban there. Pretty impressive for a CPU from what, 2007?

Classic versions of word, excel and powerpoint instead of their premium versions. Lack of onedrive, outlook, and android / IOS apps. But sure, its the same thing. Also, its "Home", "Personal", and "Family" that I showed......ALL are home versions of Office. I'm not saying that having the OPTION to rent your software or games shouldn't be allowed, I think that's a wonderful idea. Always has been. Renting serves a purpose. It's so you can try a game (any media) BEFORE you buy it and invest hundreds or thousands of hours into it. It's great. But it shouldn't be the ONLY option, and that's exactly where we're headed. Go look again at that Office chart, look at what features are NOT there when you buy a "full" license. Microsoft isn't the only company pushing this either, I'm just picking on them because this thread is about their merger with Actiblizzard. Actiblizzard is JUST as guilty of this, go look at WoW, or the latest Call of Duty yearly expansion pack for $70. I dare you, go try to play MW2 online, I'll bet matchmaking is disabled now. Whereas COD4 is still alive and kicking. They've been slowly removing features and going to a subscription based model since about 2007.

You haven't checked even on Office products lately have you? Microsoft IS doing exactly what I'm griping about lol. It's only going to continue to get worse. They're not going to magically just decide to give consumers power back over their purchases. It's bad business. $150 for a basic version is what you get to "purchase" it, or you can get a full featured version for a subscription. It's okay if you like renting things, that's fine. But me, I like to own what I buy. This is the future of gaming with Microsoft. You WILL be forced into subscription models like Game Pass.

Agreed with you on your first point about everybody having their preferences. And you know, I had Netflix for a while and Disney+. I tried to like it. But I remember several times I was wanting to go and watch something, and it was gone out of the library. The companies decide what they want on there. Game pass for $10 a month, yes it seems like a steal. You're right. Until you want to go play say (example) Forza Horizon 5, and its no longer on there anymore. Or whatever game. It's fine for casual stuff, but if you want to enjoy your titles long term its most definitely NOT the way to go. Personally, I absolutely LOVE going back and replaying my games again years later. I still pick up Crysis from 2007 every once in a while and enjoy it. COD4 still has an online community even, and that game is ALSO from 2007. There's a few modern titles that have been great too for a consumer. Tripwire seems like they've been keeping some decent morals as a game company for one example. BeamNG.drive is another, that game's been in "alpha" stages since 2013 and the devs ALLOW modding, they allow local servers, they let you do just about anything you want (within reason). Just a couple examples that I personally know of, I'm sure there's more. I understand WHY you are okay renting your games. That's fine, I used to rent SNES and N64 games from blockbuster back in the day. Nothing wrong at all with having the OPTION to. All I'm getting at, is that it should NEVER become the norm, and day one DLC's, and milking the customer dry just really grinds my gears. Or again, when game devs kill their games entirely so they're not competing with their old games themselves because an old game is still popular. You're trying to act like these things aren't a problem, but they really are. GTA IV is completely dead, they've REMOVED online from it, a feature I paid $60 for, TWICE (retail and Steam when my disc broke). It's dead because they wanted to push GTA V Online. People have been warning about this stuff for years, and its slowly becoming a reality in the gaming industry. Office was just an example of Microsoft doing the same practices. That's all I was getting at there. It's a thing, subscription models are "the future", and as a consumer, I don't appreciate it. You can claim Microsoft won't do these things, but they already are.

See, that's exactly my gripe. You're fine with RENTING your games and the "store" telling you what you can and cannot play. I'm not. If I pay good money for a game, I expect to OWN that game forever. Same thing with movies. I understand there's some licensing limitations, always has been. But I can still play my original copy of Quake from 1996. I cannot say the same for half of my Steam library.

Wow!!!! 4GHz on a Kentsfield!!!!??? Impressive. I think I might have a slightly better run on my 939 rig now that its stable, but nowhere near that lol.

If you really think paying $90+ for a complete game (with day one DLC), and subscription based models is winning........ I might have a nice rock I could sell you. This is why I refuse to touch a lot of modern games. If I pay for a game, I expect the ENTIRE game. I also do not expect to get nickle and dimed to death just to play the game. I also refuse to install a lot of the stupid DRM that is now commonplace to screw over paying customers, when the game is cracked same day anyway WITHOUT the DRM. Piracy is never going to stop, its time the companies figure out a different model. Preferably one easier on gamer's pocketbooks because today's games are getting ridiculously expensive. Microsoft is absolutely NO better than EA, look at Office. It went from you bought the Office package, it was yours.....to now you have to pay for it on a subscription model. This is NOT okay to me. There's been talks of them taking Windows itself to the same degree. Luckily they haven't yet, but when they do, I won't buy Windows ever again either.

Already done. Somehow the RDP window hung, assuming it had to do with update Tuesday last week. I thought I had taken everything offline on Tuesday to do the updates so it wouldn't be a problem, but I might've missed a rig associated with my folding rig, or the folding rig itself. Idk, that was last week.

Well let's see, how many game companies has EA gobbled up over the years? Consolidation of creative efforts under one giant umbrella is NEVER a good thing. Yes, there's more budget available, but you're stuck under the umbrella, not able to go and enjoy the beach, metaphorically speaking.

I'm going to be the odd man out here probably, but I really don't care as I refuse to buy Activision / Blizzard games anyway. Same with MS (outside of Minecraft, but that was before MS bought them). It's just Microsoft being a big company bully, same thing EA does. Don't care, I hope they rot. Probably won't happen, but hey a guy can dream.

Of course it is Getting it back online right now. Must've been because of update Tuesday or something stupid. It'll be back up within the next 10-15 minutes.

Since I was bored and decided to wipe my laptop too, here's another run in the faster rigs section. I didn't bother doing the overclock on it so its still in the 15w power envelope. Overclocking it, it absolutely will stay at 3.6GHz all the time if I need it to, but sadly I've damaged my battery from doing that.

First of the 2 Socket 939 rigs is up and 100% functional now. I'm currently trying to get the famed 3GHz stable on it right now. Enjoying Winamp and the Xonar in it. I think this is my new favorite machine to play music through! It hasn't changed much, but here's the specs. AMD Opteron 180 A8N SLI 4x1GB Corsair XMS DDR400 Sapphire HD5870 1GB HP 64GB SSD Seagate 2TB 2.5" HDD eVGA BQ600 PSU Zalman CNPS 9500 CPU cooler Yate Loon fans all over it 6 spot fan controller from UltraMega Samsung DVDRW with Lightscribe ZIP 250 Floppy Asus Xonar DG Sound Card TP Link Archer T4E Wireless NIC (onboard giga LAN is fine for LAN) Windows 7 x64 on it right now And of course, my Thermaltake cig lighter / ashtray / cupholder thingie Custom painted / windowed Rosewill Challenger case Overclock I'm trying to get stable: 250 x 12 for 3GHz HT Link at 1250MHz (stock 1000) RAM at DDR400 (200MHz) because 939 defaults to 333 as fastest divider with 4 sticks EDIT: I'm now down to HT Link at stock 1000 and RAM at 333. This Opteron 180 isn't a great chip. Seems to be good, but not great.

I too have one for ripping purposes for my NAS. I use lossy codecs though sadly, 64TB doesn't go as far as you'd think it does. Definitely a step backwards for Intel on this one. I know the future is subscription based models for everything, looking at you Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, EA, etc. I'll go ahead and skip that future though.

Only thing I'd be worried about would be the caps degrading inside of it. If you're comfortable with it, I'd pop the cover off and just take a quick peek in there and make sure none of the caps are bulging. If the caps are all flat on top, you're good to go. Be careful when in there, do NOT touch the contacts side of the caps, just in case. Capacitors do degrade sitting on the shelf sometimes. But again.....if they're flat, you're good to go. There's a VERY good chance its perfectly fine though.

The Opteron 200 series were more server oriented as those were for socket 940, which was capable of multiple sockets on one board. The Opteron 100 series were for Socket 939 which was an enthusiast platform. Think of it like people putting Xeons in their 775 boards or 1366 boards back in the day. It's the same exact thing as running the FX 60 or an Athlon x2 4400+. Just a neater name lol. They tended to overclock like mad too, 3GHz daily was impressive back then (I'm still trying to wrangle that 3GHz stable on that rig now). Sorry, just a daily dose of AMD history. EDIT: I think that score's pretty good actually. I'm beating a "quad core" on the list, and keeping right up with the Core 2 Duo on the list there. Heck, I'm beating the Athlon II which was a weakened Phenom II processor (no L3 cache). A couple of those were mobile CPU's, but still. I'm happy with that result!

I got it running kinda!!!

Alright, I've got MOST of the orders in now. I can, in theory, finish the 939 build I have going, and I can now build the second SLI 939 build. I'm missing 24pin to 20pin ATX adapters for the Socket A rigs (should've checked that), but those are on order. Missing 2 sound cards, one LAN card, and a 60mm to 80mm fan adapter all for the Socket A rigs. So once those arrive, I'll get busy.

Well, I'm out for the time being on the slow board unless I ran my Socket 939 dual core. Won't get lowest score with that. The PSU's I bought for my older rigs have 24pin ATX plugs, I need 20pin. The only PSU I have in the house that's 20+4pin that would work is an Antec VP450 of questionable condition, and it lacks the appropriate 5v amperage anyway. Going to have to order 24pin to 20pin cables to make these work. Sorry guys, I tried. EDIT: Placed an order for a couple, should be here next week. Probably too late to play with everyone but alas, I'll be able to run a bench on the Athlon 1100 once those arrive.

Day one drivers, you mean these ones? https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/geforce-344-11-whql-driver-download.html

Mine's an 1100. I was waiting until I had the case finished next month to run that one, but I just might have to.