Built my rig about a year and a half ago, although some components (graphics card being the big one- about a year old at the time) were reused. I added an SSD this year, and I hope to be able to swing a graphics card upgrade in the not too distant future, which should give quite a bit more life for most gaming.

Well said.

http://www.skymall.com/shopping/detail.htm?pid=102962936

I just looked through some of takealeapcanada's photos (look back to his post), and he has a number of HDR shots that don't look "manipulated" to me. I think it's a combination of misuse/overuse of the technique and the difference between using it for enhancement of the image and for an effect.

"There are 39645 users in the import queue ahead of you."

I generally shut down every night unless I have a particular reason to run it overnight. I do have virus scans/updates set overnight, so about once a week I leave it on for that, but in general I see no reason not to save power by shutting it down overnight. The 10 seconds of boot time when I first use it isn't that…

Just thought I'd show you this, I found the workaround I mentioned for MSI Afterburner to show additional information instead of just graphics stuff. I tried it out, and it seems to work quite well. It takes a bit of work to set up (as well as additional software), but lets you see things in real time after that. …

Performance Monitor is nice, although I find it to be a pain to set up. I generally just use the performance tab of task manager, or anything else that shows memory and CPU usage with a reasonable history (for CPU, make sure you get per core). Shortly after heavy usage, alt-tab and see what got hit hard.

From what I've seen the 7870XT is as good as, if not better than the 660Ti in most benches using the newest drivers, and costs significantly less. Future driver updates could change things I suppose, but right now it's a much better deal IMO.

By single slot card do you mean a card that takes up only one slot, or only 1 physical card? Also, are you sure 5790 is correct? AFAIK there is no Radeon HD 5790. A budget range would help too.

Depends a bit on what you're doing, but if it's between the hard drive and graphics, I'd say the graphics card is probably your best bet. If you can do everything you want with 100% the performance you want, the SSD might be worth it, but if you're actually seeing lower performance than you want (e.g. low fps while…

In the "show your custom PC" thread last week there were a number of people asking for tips on cable management. It's a rather specific request, but it might be something that would help a number of newer builders clean things up.

Not always, some games have draw distance as an option. Not being able to see your enemies when they see you is a hefty disadvantage.

MSI Afterburner. It's an overclocking tool, but it also has monitors for pretty much everything imaginable on your graphics card. Just ignore the overclocking part if you aren't interested.

You identify the bottleneck by taking the time to watch your system usage while doing whatever task(s) you wish to improve. If your fps in a game is low, and your GPU is only at 50% usage, graphics is not your bottleneck. Likewise, if you're only at 25% memory usage, memory is not your bottleneck. If you have…

Agreed with Anibal, don't bother upgrading graphics in this system, with an Athlon and 1.5GB DDR1, the system as a whole needs upgrading.

If you play nothing but wow, a GTX 460 is probably already more than you need. I wouldn't bother unless you want the upgrade for kicks and have the money to spare.

Enjoy

Chances are if anyone is in it, they're under NDA and can't (or shouldn't) tell you anything. There's been plenty of articles about it on various gaming sites though, try googling for it. My impression of it so far is that it's relatively fun, but the map size is extremely limiting.