What computer/OS are you using?

[Nichi]

I know of EZ-BIOS, which is what I use on the Yeti, but IDK if the version I have will work on a hard drive not made by Maxtor. Might be worth a shot, though

[Nichi]

So, new member of the fleet, and the 3rd Mac :3

iBook G4
Name: Sara
CPU: PowerPC G4 (1.2Ghz)
RAM: 768MB
OS: Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.8 )

During a trip I took to a computer recycling place, to get rid of some laptops I didn't want anymore, I ended up trading them as credit toward this iBook. It's quite clean and works well; just needing a fresh installation of Leopard, while Sonata can now run OS9 primarily :3

I just need a name for this Mac, though... It has been decided. Her name is Sara; after the human name of Apple III-tan (Although this is the 3rd Mac of the fleet, not the 3rd Apple product as a whole)

[svx]

Woo, upgraded svx's computers are upgraded!

My main computer:
Motherboard: Gigabyte X58A-UD3R
Processor: Intel Core i7 920 @ 2.67GHz (socket 1366 for server boards)
RAM: 6GB triple channel DDR3 @ some amount of MHz I forgot :<
Video: nVidia GTS 250 :<
Mouse: Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0a (BEST GAMING MOUSE EVERRRR) @ 500 Hz, 400 DPI
Keyboard: Das Keyboard Ultra/Silent (Cherry MX Brown switches)
Mousepad: Roccat Taito mTw edition
Monitors: DELL P1130 (CRT) @ 160 Hz (for gaming),  Vizio M220VA 16:9 LCD (60Hz) (for everything else)

My laptop:
I dunno, I haven't used it in ages. :<  Some Dell Core 2 Duo thing, or something...

My phone:
HTC Evo 3D, hBoot 1.4 (S-OFF) ... Best phone everrrrrr! So far... :p

[Red-Machine]

I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but "upgraded"?  All that hardware is several generations old, and the GTS 250 was a mainstream card when it was new, let alone now.

And how can a 400dpi mouse be the "BEST GAMING MOUSE EVERRRR"?  Minimum dpi for gaming these days is 1600, even 800dpi is too little...

[Nichi]

So, I learned some stuff today, and also made some upgrades:

- My Amiga can boot directly into the games I have, without needing a Workbench disk. Good to know

- 2k-tan the Desktop can boot directly into MS-DOS. I took a few pics of her running MS-DOS 5.0 :3

- Frankenstein V3 now has Firewire and USB 2.0 ports, along with an increase from 512MB of RAM to 640MB; one step closer to the maximum for this desktop. Me gusta

[svx]

I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but "upgraded"?  All that hardware is several generations old, and the GTS 250 was a mainstream card when it was new, let alone now.

And how can a 400dpi mouse be the "BEST GAMING MOUSE EVERRRR"?  Minimum dpi for gaming these days is 1600, even 800dpi is too little...

YOU'RE ON TO ME!

Anyway, you have legit points!  A few generations old, I guess.  Anyway, I'd say there's a marginal performance difference between my equipment (sans the old video card that was $99 when I bought it a long time ago :p) and most of the mainstream stuff these days.  It is an upgrade indeed, though, since I'm coming from a Core2 Quad q6600 to an LGA 1366 motherboard that can support some mighty, mighty fast Xeon processors, far beyond my trendy i7 920.

The mouse thing is a bit of a confusing topic though!  A lot of people think that more DPI translates to higher precision all around, but... Well, that would certainly be the case if you're running games in high resolutions where it'd be impossible to make, for instance, a movement the size of a single pixel on the screen with a lower DPI mouse, but that's a rarity for me.  Actually, it's inverse for me:  higher DPI = a bad thing, when playing FPS games like QuakeWorld / Quake Live / etc in 800x600 or so, so that I can achieve 160+ hz on my CRT (else the pixel clock can't keep up!)

In higher (read: much higher) resolutions, more DPI is nice.  In normal resolutions, it is horribly over-rated, and IMO, a lot of people would play better if they cranked their 3600 DPI sensors down to more reasonable values instead of compensating for it by lowering their in-game sensitivity. 

The qualities that make the IntelliMouse 3.0a the best mouse ever for me are the same qualities that have made it a legendary mouse all around in the gaming scene, ever since its introduction years and years ago.  Microsoft actually discontinued production of the IE 3.0 a long time ago, but brought it back due to the huge outcry from gamers (but it's been discontinued again... bastards).  Steelseries and Alienware made special customized versions of it (steelseries branded ie 3.0 is awesome btw :p) and, due to how awesomely ergonomic it is, a ton of mice have been released that still try to look/feel like it.  Even to this very day.

The reasons it's legendary, quickly:

Amazingly ergonomic (for most people; some people absolutely hate it)
No prediction whatsoever if ran at, IIRC, 250+ Hz (<250 = a slight negative accel bug); tracking in FPS games is effortless
One of the best optical sensors available (but the Logitech MX518 beats it, which is why it is also a legendary mouse :p)
The sensor scales perfectly up to 1000 Hz with the malfunction point moving FURTHER away, rather than closer
Five perfectly positioned buttons, which is 1 more than I've ever needed
Aftermarket teflon skatez from Hyperglide are still sold, and make this one of the slickest gliding mice I've ever felt
Cheap as dirt on eBay... It was also cheap as dirt when it was released
And it looks amazing, too

[Nichi]

Sounds cool. Pics of it?

[svx]

Sounds cool. Pics of it?

Ask and ye shall receive :p  Here's some pictures I just took of mine:




(edit)

Here's the third image; I had trouble getting it thumbnail-sized...  Imageshack is more broken than ever.  :<

[Nichi]

I almost bought a mouse like that, ages ago

[svx]

There are very few mice / (some people call them "mouses") that really compete in actual usage, if you ask me.  That's my opinion, based on having used a lot of other popular gaming mice, and speaking with professional Quake players (though, admittedly, none of the division 0/top tier players I've spoken to use the IE 3.0 anymore...)

A lot of really good players are using mice like the Logitech G9X (there's a patch to remove prediction that has to be applied to its firmware), the Logitech MX518 (old, like the IE 3.0), and the Logitech G400 (the MX518 was so good that Logitech currently markets the G400 as "the new MX518" right on its box).

For me though, nothing has ever operated as smoothly as this IE 3.0.  :>  Every other mouse I've tried has had little problems that just turned me off to them, like the prediction in the Logitech G-series mice, the poor quality of Razer mice (the Deathadder is pretty much based off of the IE 3.0, but its build quality is severely flimsy), etc, etc...

If anyone ever wanted to get an IE 3.0 for some reason though...  I'd highly suggest not buying one of the later models that were manufactured in China.  The build quality is actually worse than anything Razer has ever produced, with cheap Chinese microswitches that barely even click, plastic buttons that almost want to fall out, and a scroll wheel that will outright come ajar and that will need to be "hacked" back into place (there's tutorials for it :p)...

The Legends edition (the version Microsoft released in response to the outrage amongst gamers when they discontinued the mouse the first time around) is the way to go.  :>

[Red-Machine]

160Hz+?  The human eye can't even discern between 60 and 70Hz let alone 60 and 160+Hz.  Running in such a low resolution PURELY for the refresh rates is just pointless, considering that you can't tell the difference.

[Chocofreak13]

did you not just hear how he was saying that this is all his opinion?

srsly, man. >>;;

@svx: that looks an awful lot like the mice that were at my high school. but that's probably just the colour scheme. xD

[svx]

160Hz+?  The human eye can't even discern between 60 and 70Hz let alone 60 and 160+Hz.  Running in such a low resolution PURELY for the refresh rates is just pointless, considering that you can't tell the difference.

You've caught me again!

Well, not 4srs, I guess.  I've heard this myth floating around many times throughout the years, and I've just got to say that it's purely untrue!  Input lag aside as an entirely different matter, there is certainly a tangible difference between lower refresh rates and higher ones, and it's absolutely observable to most humans.  The catch is, most humans don't exactly know what types of anomalies and artifacts they're looking for when they're making observations about it.

There's not going to be a noticeable difference for certainly applications, though.  The cursor on your screen is going to look fine at 60 Hz.  Most syndicated television shows will be "omg this is high-def awesome" at 60 Hz, which is why HDMI was explicitly created with a bandwidth limitation that carries 60 Hz at 1920x1080.

There are also reasons that dual-link DVI exists for 120 Hz, though, and why Samsung owns patents for a frame-doubling feature on their 60 Hz televisions.  But, that's just 120 Hz!

I'd say, generally, that increments of 20-30 Hz are noticeable in gaming, even if you're ignoring specific input lag limitations.  I'm not talking about the hacks applied to make 60 Hz LCD's act and feel like 120 Hz, either; I'm talking about CRT's, where the frequency is actually relevant!

At 60 Hz in a fast-paced FPS game, you're going to get a headache.  The shearing, warping, and tearing effects are going to play havoc on your head, and you're going to notice the low refresh.  I do, anyway.  At 85 Hz, it feels substantially smoother, and more "natural"; there is less tearing, but it's still noticeable.  At 120 Hz (real frequency; again, not LCD hax), the tearing essentially goes away for me, and all is well.  Until you go higher.  My upper limit is around 160 Hz, which is what I prefer to stay at!  At 160 Hz, the image is smoother.  There's no tearing, no shearing, no ghosting, no warping whatsoever, and the picture is noticeably "smoother" than any other frequency.

Anyway, here's some testimonials from across teh interwebz for justice!

Dude I've totally been saying this for a long time now. I remember back in the day when I used to go to LANs a lot, people with vsync on at 1024x768 would get 60 fps in Half-Life/CS because the frames were synched with a monitor's refresh rate of only 60 hz, there was a hack you could do to get the monitor to run at 100 hz (if supported) in games at that resolution which meant that you could leave vsync on and still get 100 fps without any tearing at all. People would quickly point out to me that you can't see the difference between 60 and 100 fps, when one CLEARLY could.

The human eye-brain-combination can see well over 200 frames per second, and as of today, there has not been a method to fully test the eye to its limits. The 60 or 100 frame per second limit commonly quoted in the past is completely false. Such low frame rates are easily distinguishable from higher frame rates and without the aid of special measuring instrumentation.

(in the above case, frames can be interpreted as monitor frequency for obvious reasons :p)

If you don't want to read it all, then the short answer is, the human eye / brain combination can see well over 100 frames per second and thus far the limits have not thoroughly been tested yet. Suffice it to say, IT IS NOTHING LIKE THE 24, 30, 60 or even 100 fps crap, that gets spouted on the Internet.

etc etc :p

Anyway, my upper limit is 160 Hz to alleviate tearing, shearing, ghosting, etc, with grayscale images where those artifacts are most apparent to me.



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@svx: that looks an awful lot like the mice that were at my high school. but that's probably just the colour scheme. xD

Man, these mice were so common!  :>  I remember seeing piles of them in old computer stores and stuff...  They're a dieing breed now.  Except for the cheap Chinese ones...  ...By the way, I own one of those too :p  It's a lot darker gray-colored (like a silver, almost?), and it practically fell apart within a week of light usage.

My brother had to fix it for me.  He's a mad hardware hax0r, so it took him like 10 minutes to use his hot air gun soldering station to reattach the scroll wheel, remold most of the outer shell, and then he replaced the cheap microswitches with some INCREDIBLY amazing/clicky ones from an old, non-brand-name PS2 mouse that actually seemed to be an IBM inside.  IBM... is everywhere...

It's vurry nice now, but I still play with my Legends edition just because it... hasn't ever needed modding...  :p

[Chocofreak13]

i believe quincy has a similar one. xD

[Nichi]

I'm beginning to think something's wrong with Asagi :[

Like, even after a reformat back in January, along with cleaning out the cat hair and dust just before my trip, she still isn't back to 100%. Like, she runs slower, the touchpad is often unresponsive, and earlier, I kept getting kicked from Skype every single time I load a YouTube video in Firefox, which forced me to either do a full reboot or just my wifi card just so I can log back into Skype >_<;;;

I love Asagi, but I'm almost tempted to kick her to the curb and go home with a MacBook Pro or something. She's being a disgrace to the legacy of her predecessors >_>;

EDIT: Well, I'd likely keep her around as a spare at the very least. I was just very frustrated last night