xthetenth

Considering the x86 architechture, I wouldn't be surprised if it were pretty easy to take advantage of the fact you're running a real CPU to translate graphics API calls over from what you're using and call it a day.

I used to be able to drive the Nurburgring in Forza without assists, which was pretty cool. I'm so happy I'm pretty much done with the AAA game market. Honestly though, they've gotten so damned refined that they're just hitting the same notes and I've sen everything before. Weird smaller budget games are a lot more interesting because they aren't designed by the accountants.

The thermostat is not in my room. The house is a nice temperature, my room has a computer disagreeing with the notion. So TDP kinda matters to me.

8 gigs shared high bandwidth graphics RAM in both consoles. There's gimmick cards coming out with that much already, but cards are actively using 4 gigs for the settings they can drive. I'm more annoyed about the processors being AMD versions of Atom. 8 cores of that isn't much at all. At least it might teach devs to code with multiple threads cause it's the only way they're getting anything out of it. The nice thing about the processor is that a platform can actually last a long time before it gets marginal. That's why I thought about getting a Haswell-E until I realized it'd make the heat output into my relatively small room more than I wanted.

God no wonder it took three hours to get that thing hooked up. That's a bit nuts and it clearly predates cable management as a concept. The controller's cool though, but modern software stuff with fan curves is cooler yet. And it's back when AMD was a good buy. God. My first build was a Core 2 Duo with an 8600 GT that I got late enough to step up to an 8800 GT. I did that build at just the right time to get two revolutionary bits of price/performance new hotness. And then I stuck it all in an NZXT Apollo in orange because that build apparently predated good taste, although it had this cool art deco-y look to it. And yeah. A full gig, you were a cool dude back then.

Yep, installing to one drive and leaving the rest hooked up works just fine. I only just took a seven year old drive out of my computer a few weeks ago, and formatting them and pulling their files works just fine.

When you put a new install of an OS on a computer it should give you a choice between the two installed OSes in a nice little screen. I tend to try out new versions of windows, so I've seen it a bunch. I'm pretty sure there's absolutely no problems with installing the same OS on the same motherboard, after all, what happens if your hard drive dies and you have to replace it? Here's a bit of a microsoft guide to the whole process.

Processors these days automatically throttle to lower speeds when they get too hot. With a good liquid block you'll be fine. This is a pretty good benchmark although they don't include the delta relative to the room temp unfortunately. That's on the 4770k, a much hotter chip than your 4790k. I wouldn't be surprised to see being able to run a 4.5 GHz full core OC at under 60 or even 55 C. Less than that depends on room and everything, but I've seen stuff to indicate that a 15 C drop from the 4770k to 4790 is a pretty reasonable guess. Gains get smaller at lower temperatures though, of course. Core temps in the 70s or higher are probably where you'd prefer to dial it back to get the most power/performance and longevity on the chip, so that'd be plenty for you. Noctua's color is weird. I'm pretty sure the color is because they know they make some of the best stuff, so that color instantly says "I have money to burn on awesome Austrian fans and I care about the performance more than the bling". It is distinctive. I'm probably going to buy some phanteks fans in all white and stuff the noctuas in a different part of the case if the phanteks fans are as good (and I think they're close at least, better be if I'm getting a case with a bunch in it). . Noctua's also released later series of fans in a grey and dark grey scheme and industrial ones in black with brown grommets on the corners. The Swiftech is gorgeous though, it's high end stuff (the seperate pump is actually because of copyright issues iirc).

O/S is a good thing to put on another drive, but moving is kind of a pain. Basically if you've got your install media you can pretty much throw a new install on and go from there. You can then copy the contents of your libraries over and it's pretty smooth sailing from there, the main pain is setting up installs again and getting the installations that like to have registry keys reinstalled. Steam games you can just copy over your steamapps folder into the steamapps folder of a new steam install. Tanks will probably want a new install. Moving would be ugly and probably be a matter of drive cloning tools, I don't have experience there. Even if I could tell you WOWS system requirements I'd put no faith in them, alpha and all.

I would.

Yeah, that'd do it. The answer is clearly Saturn-Shuttle (good luck!) and a landing strip in Texas. Bonus points for a base on the East coast, one in the Midwest and one in California for high-speed cold war shenanigans.

Of course they were going to launch them out of Vandenberg, and there's no islands ~1000 mi west of there. I'm going to need a bit of a sitdown regarding the geometry for launching out of California vs. Florida, but that'll probably be a bit of a non-starter with the single orbit requirement. I'm not sure there's a decent solution other than not tying the future of the space program to an F-111 writ large, then.

So I think Unstart and I have pretty similar ideas. I don't know how well that sort of idea would have fared politically, because some people think furthering scientific development and advancing the knowledge of the universe isn't a good goal, and filling the Air Force requirements made it look nice to the cold warriors, but I think the cost of that weight really killed a lot of the potential of the program. Alternate idea. Ditch the cross range requirement by building a second base 1000 miles away. Pretty sure a base pair in the right part of Texas and Florida would get things done in that respect. That would at least save the cost of the wings. The box fuselage might still be a thing because of some of the requirements for bringing satellites down, but at least we've transferred some of the cost away from every single mission into a single sunk cost, which turns it from a downside to being able to mercilessly weild the sunk cost fallacy against the government to get more missions launched.

Found this looking for what the Air Force's involvement did to the Shuttle design, seems pretty solid: Why Does the Space Shuttle Have Wings?: A Look at the Social Construction of Technology in Air and Space And this big beautiful archive of scanned Standard Aircraft Characteristics and other datasheets for US aircraft: Standard Aircraft Characteristics Archive And a paper by Ben Rich OCR'ed that I've seen a few places before: The Strategic Aspect of Supercruising Flight

I'd say that cutting capability down considerably in order to drive prices down is absolutely vital, I'd be totally behind that Shuttle II that puts less into orbit if it were something that could be launched affordably for the vast majority of missions. Frankly if reusable components are too expensive because the maintenance is painful but recycling their materials and building new would work better do that, because that way you're building more components and bigger production lines drive costs down in a way dudes in clean suits don't. However, push the limits because part of the point is to keep the technology progressing. A lot of the goal is to cause change, so leading the target is good sense. Light can very often be good because weight is a huge contributor to a feedback loop requiring progressively bigger rockets. Ounces hurt, so you'd better trim down. The goal is a spaceborne A4D because we're looking for the inflection point where it gets as cheap as possible to get a pound to orbit, because in my opinion we're trying to make it as cheap as possible to launch things, because that opens up the market much wider. The more launches the better. For that we want something that is a fixed purpose ship for hauling things of a given weight that includes a significant fraction of the things that are currently and would be were the price to fall launched. The biggest thing we absolutely do not need is to burden it with any other requirements. This goes to the biggest problem with the shuttle in my opinion; they had to get it to satisfy Air Force requirements for a cold warrior sattelite carrier, including the capability to go on an orbit around the Earth's poles, deploy a reconnaissance sattelite, retrieve an errant spacecraft or even capture an enemy spacecraft and return to its launch site after only one orbit. If you've ever wondered where the 1,100 mile cross range requirement came from, there it is. So every time the Shuttle went up, it was paying for dead weight wings that weren't needed for the civilian mission. This sort of thing drives costs up. The Air Force also wanted the bay to go from 50k pounds to 15 x 60 feet that could hold 50k to 65k pounds and have doors that could easily open up into space (sattelite shenanigans again). That ruled out a lifting body. Again this adds to the amount of weight the thing was carrying around that did nothing, and meant that the shielding had to be tiles again because of weight requirements. (Source courtesy of NASA) I also tend to feel that sucking it up and using disposable heavy lift rockets to do space station carrying is probably better because the goal is to make space missions and space technology cheaper, not specifically to drive down the cost of heavy lift. This is personal opinion though. The Shuttle was a great idea, the problem was we got an F-111B rather than an F-14. Yes my analogies are entirely to naval aircraft, why do you ask? I like the looks of the X-37 though, that looks good.

Kind of, but more the original ideas for STS, with smaller wings and less added mass in other places to gain fruity spy sattelite handling capabilities and more utilitarian space-truckiness. SLS is pretty sweet though.

That's a thing. I've got one of these big bad beauties waiting for me to get a motherboard without the only PCIe x16 being in the first slot and therefore blocked by the cooler, and as far as I can tell that's the gold standard of air cooling. As far as I can tell it's going to cool the hell out of a CPU for overclocking as well as a closed loop water cooler until you get to E series processors (which you don't have one of). If you're looking for a bit less aggressive option, the phanteks offerings offer pretty good price/performance and come in colors that are a bit more computer chic than 'chai latte'. The PF-TC14PE is most of the performance of the Noctua, and should do a little bit better for raw performance than that Cooler Master. However these options don't look like a totally freaking awesome match for your build, so the choice is definitely yours there. For closed loop, I don't think they'll do what they do as quietly as one of the Noctua or Phanteks (or a thermalright silver arrow), and I wouldn't go with the corsair one because I hear it takes $50 of fans to bring it to even with the noctua for noise (I think the cooler master Seidons are pretty decent kit for the all in one style), but the biggest thing you buy with one is the flexability in your build usually at the cost of noise. It may not be as efficient as pouring all your money into two top end 140mm radiators and fans hanging off your socket, but it lets you get the heat to a different part of the case so it isn't potentially overlapping RAM or the first PCIe slot. The nice thing about the Noctua is it has a nice compatibility list. Phanteks doesn't seem to have socket 1150 listed, pcpartpicker lists it as compatible with your mobo, but I'd do a quick check with a ruler and the dimensions listed http://www.phanteks.com/ph-tc14pe.html. Also nice pick on the PSU, didn't realize how good a job eVGA were doing in that regard. If you really want to go water, I'd recommend the Swiftech H240-X which starts with good fans, and is actually made of good liquid cooling equipment but set up so it's got a three year maintenance free guarantee. If the water cooling bug really bites you you can expand it too because it's actually just good water cooling gear in a compact easy to handle package.

I can read good and stuff. I'd still want to see what the STS could've been.

I'd love to see a Kerbal version of what the SLS might've looked like if the Air Force hadn't gotten their claws into it with their "interesting" performance requirements. Something that's pure space truck rather than a space truck that can also directly pop up into orbit, snag a Soviet satellite and come back down.

Yeah, of late the fact that the motherboards have control over the implementation of turbo is pretty much resulting in boards running the top turbo bin all the time. YMMV. 4.3 might be an overclock function turned on as well. Tmax on cpus is usually in the high 80s to low 90s C range. If you're not actually overclocking the CPU I'd consider keeping it under 60 under load to be fine for most use (although I just got 1.5 kilos of heatsink to hang off my processor so I want it a good bit cooler than that). That's weird about the drive. Not sure what's up there.

For a drive your size I'd recommend everything except games and other huge media, and if you've got some games you play a ton endlessly or some with interminable load times you could bring those over too. I'm currently running a 160 GB one with a 15 GB game, and most everything on my computer other than my music and steam libraries on it. Generally the absolutely killer stuff where it'll make a huge difference is the sort of application where it makes a lot of little writes. Stuff like a web browser is a great candidate because there's a bunch of writes to various log files that are totally tiny but can slow down loading it and opening new tabs. If you've got the room for the OS, do it. Booting gets a bunch faster especially on windows 8 or 8.1 (and presumably on 10), and it can help prevent any annoying slowdowns. For an example that covers a lot of different things, http://anandtech.com/show/3741/asus-u30jc-ssd covers the impacts of switching a pretty old laptop over to an old ssd with a decent breakdown of what affects things the most. I'd guess you're on something newer than a laptop nehalem i3, so if anything more of the slowdowns and bottlenecks will be your storage subsystem. I'd personally tend to put things like games (and music if you need more room*) over on the platter drive because other than load times it doesn't hurt much. Something like tanks where loading in slowly's worst case can bite you can also be worth some spare space if you've got it. *I make no promises for Win 7, but in Win 8(.1) you can open up computer, right click on any library, click properties, click the location tab, and move libraries around freely, which makes it painless to move them over to a platter drive. Music is either streamed quickly enough or it's not and it's pretty bulky en masse so it's a good candidtate to free up some room.

So that's what that giant thing in Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager was. Super neat. Cutting out the docking seems like it might have been a good idea, the real question was whether they'd be able to put the money and effort into making an amazing rocket like the F-1 was, or whether way too many engines was the right decision for the Soviets.

Interestingly it seems that SpaceShipTwo was lost due to a problem with the feather mechanism coming unlocked while the engine was on, not the engine itself. Considering the engine problems they'd been having, it's probably significantly less bad than the experimental fuel causing the problem.

Play Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space Space Program Manager instead, Gemini earth orbit rendezvous (if you're too much of a cheapskate to develop anything bigger than Gemini) and Gemini direct ascent (if you think docking is for men who are not proper men with rigid rockets) are options. Warning: game is very similar to a board game, just with a PC for bookkeeping.

This is it for me. WT tanks feels like it was designed with an intense disregard if not outright antipathy for its players' time. I decided I was done when I got critted by arty, alt-tabbed and played a round of WoT.' Also it seems like the design decisions were driven by a weird hybrid of realism, "realism", and being not WoT with three modes done by scabbing UI changes onto a base game, while WoT has a very coherent idea of gameplay that makes for a game whose elements work well together. WoT is a third person shooter where there's an action economy that really matters, situational awareness is king, and most important for me a good decision is very likely to get consistently rewarded (although it's easy to get angry when you think you made a good decision and were instead gambling).