JamesDwho

Looks like Rockstar don't want a repeat of GTA IV, I really wonder how bad a state the game must be in at the moment for them to delay it 2 months.

A good way to find out where the congestion is in your connection is to perform a traceroute, it will show each hop (network router) your connection passes, where there is a large delta in minimum and maximum ping then that may likely be the cause. If that's the case you might need to you contact your ISP. To do a traceroute find the IP of the server you're trying to connect to and then in windows command prompt type "tracert (server IP here)" eg "tracert 8.8.8.8" . If it is an issue with one of the network hops that's either on the server provider side or the ISP side using a VPN may resolve your problem depending on what is the issue. Although using a VPN for online play will likely result in higher ping, it all depends on where the VPN server is located.

Civ 5 is quite CPU and RAM intensive (there is actually an achievement for RAM Usage), the large the world size and the more AI you have the more processing power you need, the minimum requirements say an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 64 2.0 GHz with 2GB of RAM so I really doubt it will run very well if at all on a single core system. But as typographie said you can always try the Steam Demo.

The search is actually still there, it's just commented out in the html. In Chrome If you "Inspect element" then look for <div id="branding"> then <div class="main_width"> then under <div id="logo"> Edit as HTML and delete the comment marks ( <!-- ). Not exactly fast but if you want to use the forum search then I guess you have that option.

I am very disappointed by this news, I was planning on splurging on a Corsair K95 RGB with MX Blue switches, but it seems that Corsair has made up my mind for me. I can understand Corsair's stance here, clearly Cherry has dropped the ball here and are not producing the MX Blue RGB switches in enough quantity nor the quality that is required for mainstream production. I find it interesting it took this long for this announcement to come out, back in October of last year users on the Corsair Forum were complaining about "mushy" and inconsistent RGB MX Blue switches on their K70 and K95 Keyboards. So it seems that Corsair have had some idea there was something wrong with their products for some time and have not decided to inform their customers and followers accordingly. Another issue I take with this "announcement" is the amount of suppression and general obfuscation this announcement has had. I shouldn't have to find out this news on a user made post on a community hardware and technology forum, when I follow all the mainstream media channels for Corsair. I have not seen a single mention of the RGB MX Blue keyboard discontinuation on either of the Corsair or Corsair Gaming Facebook or Twitter profiles. It seems that of the back of the "Corsair Gaming Logo Fiasco" that Corsair has decided that any and all potentially negative announcements like this and the recent 'RGB Keyboard Colour range' issue need to be kept as quiet as possible to not risk damaging their public image even further. I seriously have to call Corsair's integrity into question here, this isn't the behaviour of a reputable brand or company in my opinion, by keeping this news hidden from public view it only helps exacerbate the disdain towards Corsair and its operations. They seriously need to step up their game when it comes to handling public relations issues, because as it stands this is not acceptable enough let alone good enough for the Corsair brand. I do also find it interesting that Corsair says that "Cherry MX Blue as a key overall isn't a very popular switch in comparison to Red and Brown. This may be contrary to what many believe but based on the volume of what we've been asked to produce, Cherry MX Blue is vastly outsold by Red and Brown MX (both RGB and single LED). This isn't just from a single region either and ultimately played a role in our decision to discontinue the MX Blue RGB." Perhaps their own internal metrics show that to be the case but that doesn't affect a user's preference nor the interest of would be customers. That entire paragraph only serves as a way to marginalize and alienate a dedicated group of their customer base by telling them that "because most people don't buy our Cherry MX Blue keyboards, you shouldn't want to either, otherwise you're weird for desiring to do so". It's simply a thinly veiled justification to try and explain the shortfalls of Corsair and Cherry's product quality. On top of that it only helps to further exacerbate arguments and general disenchantment with the brand, nothing more, and that is exactly what you have in this forum thread and many others including on the Corsair Forums. Hopefully the quality control issue with the RGB MX Blue switches does get resolved in the near future, but until that time I'm afraid to say that Corsair has lost me as a customer and they will certainly not be on the top of my peripheral maker recommendations list. Looks like I'm keeping my 2011 Razer BlackWidow with MX Blue switches for a while longer.

I recently upgraded from a WD 1TB Black Drive to a Seagate 2TB SSHD, partially because the WD Black drive was developing SMART errors and I also wanted better load times and more space. I definitely noticed a difference in map load times in BF4 with an SSHD over just a regular Hard Drive although the biggest problem with the SSHD drives from Seagate is that they only have 8GB of SSD Storage to cache files, considering the size of games these days this basically results in slow HDD like load times in BF4 and other games the moment the map changes. What I've done for PC's I've built for friends is to setup Intel SRT SSD Caching. Generally I pair a WD 1TB Blue drive with whatever is the cheapest and best performing 60GB SSD, their load times are SSD fast across all games and they don't have to worry about managing games around on limited SSD size. Not to mention that this sort of acceleration with this capacity is much cheaper than buying a 512GB or 1TB SSD.

Generally I find that buying from local AU PC retailers is always the better option over getting it shipped in from the US. Once you factor in exchange rate (which isn't doing as well atm) and add in shipping and extra handling charges it ends up being about the same minus $10-$20 and if you ever need to return it or get support because it got damaged in transit or lost it becomes even more difficult and costly. A Good way to find out who is the cheapest PC retailer in AUS for a particular item is to use a site called StaticIce http://staticice.com.au

It could depending on your hardware configuration and in game settings. Some BF4 players have been able to work around microstutter issues by changing driver settings or playing around with in game commands such as "RenderDevice.RenderAheadLimit" and "Gametime.MaxVariableFps" there doesn't really seem to be one big fix though, the solutions tend to vary a lot and in some cases 'fixes' for some people actually make it worse. It's a lot of trial and error unfortunately.

When in game open the console and type "perfoverlay.drawgraph 1". This shows the frametimes (framerate) graph for the game, there are two lines one for GPU and one for CPU. When the game stutters you should see one or possible both lines spike up the screen.

I don't really think that's a fair argument, most games don't perform well at 4K let alone at 60FPS and as Civ is a turn based game anything 30FPS or above is perfectly fine. We're not talking about Assassins Creed Unity here, we're talking about Civ 5 a soon to be 5 year old game. I can easy play Civ 5 at over 90-100 FPS with a GTX 670 on High Settings with 8X MSAA at 1080p and yes that is endgame with Satellites researched so the entire map is visible.

Civ 5 doesn't take much GPU power to run, the recommended specifications are to have a Radeon HD 4800 or Nvidia 9800 with 512MB of Ram or better. Though in single player CPU performance does matter quite a bit particularly on bigger map sizes. An R7 250 should be able to handle Civ 5 at high details at 1080p. If you can afford spending a little more than $100 I'd recommend getting the R7 250X instead of just the regular 250. According to Toms Hardware, In Battlefield 4 the 250X gets about double the frame rate of the regular 250. You can get an R7 250X for about $109 from Umart or about $118 from MSY.

Sounds like a DNS resolution issue, the website resolves for me using Google DNS but doesn't using my ISP's DNS Server. Perhaps trying changing the DNS servers in your router to use Google's DNS Servers instead (8.8.8.8 Primary, 8.8.4.4 Secondary)

You could try setting a Static Address for your PC via Network Adapter's IPv4 Properties, that would negate the address lease expiration.

Yes there is, squid3 expands on the regular squid functionality and allows you to create a reverse proxy and do more advanced filtering of HTTPS traffic. I would recommend uninstalling all the squid packages you have installed and start fresh first with the regular squid 2.7.x package, once that's working then you should be able to setup some of the more advanced dynamic caching with squid3.

Generally speaking intel NIC's tend to perform a little better and tend to have lower CPU usage overhead, but for your needs Gigabit Realtek NIC's should be perfectly fine. In an enterprise scenario it might be a different story. As for the proxy Cache it seems that you have only installed the squid3 package and not just the regular squid package. You need the regular Squid package enable a transparent proxy, with a transparent proxy the network traffic from the devices on your network will automatically be passed through the proxy server rather than needing to configure specific proxy address for every device. All of your other settings for Cache Management and memory usage look fine.

A good way to find out where the additional latency and packet loss is coming from is to ping your router via command prompt using the ping command. For Example "ping 192.168.1.1" if it doesn't time out then it's likely to do with your internet connection or some other equipment between you and the server you're connecting to. A good way to diagnose that is to do a traceroute which will show each hop (network router) your connection passes, where there is a large delta in minimum and maximum ping then that may likely be the cause. If that's the case you might need to you contacting your ISP. To do a traceroute find the IP of the server you're trying to connect to and then in command prompt type "tracert (server IP here)" eg "tracert 8.8.8.8"

That's likely to do with the motherboard's Wake on Lan functionality, wake on lan allows you to turn on a computer remotely via sending a "magic packet" over your local network to the network card. If you want to turn this off you should be able to disable it in the Advanced driver settings for the network adaptor or in the motherboard's Power Management options, it will probably be called either "Wake on Lan" or "EuP Support" in the Bios.

I find it very concerning that a single EA employee has this much unfettered access to customer information, they can just ban someone's account without any appropriate checks and balances.

All looks fairly good to me, no real issues when it comes to the hardware, I would change some things if this was my build just out of personal preference but everything you've got there is fine. One issue I do have with the build though is the WiFi Card. I've dealt with WiFi cards like that one quite a lot and they usually are very poor performing and are very sensitive high temperatures particularly in an Australian Summer. I would suggest ditching the WiFi card because WiFi is utter garbage for gaming and instead get a $50-$60 PowerLine Ethernet kit, you will have significantly more LAN bandwidth at your disposal and also have significantly lower latency (ping) and packet loss. If you're unfamiliar with powerline ethernet basically instead of using WiFi and the heavily congested 2.4Ghz frequency you instead a Wall Socket PowerLine Ethernet kit that will use the electrical wiring in the walls to transfer data, the performance is much closer to that of an actual UTP Ethernet cable when compared to WiFi but without the need to actually put wiring in the walls. TP-Link PowerLine Kit - http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=200_1348&products_id=16992 PC CaseGear PowerLine Kits - http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=200_1348&vk_sort=1

MSY have the Asus VS239H for about $159, it's a 23" 1080p IPS Monitor so the response times are perhaps not going to be as low as you might find on a more traditional "Gaming" monitor but it's rated at 5ms GtG. I personally use this as my third monitor and I find that the response time is perfectly fine for gaming, the colour reproduction and viewing angles are also very good for the price. MSY VS239H Listing: http://www.msy.com.au/qldonline/peripherals/14506-asus-ips-23-vs239h-j-1920x1080-5ms-hdmi-dvi-d-d-dub-led-backlight-lcd-monitor.html

The UK is becoming an Orwellian Nightmare one privacy violation at a time.

I personally use the Asus VS239H (23" 1920x1080 IPS) as my third monitor in Portrait. Very good monitor for the price although the stock stand is a little rubbish, although it does has a VESA mount so you can mount to something else if the stand is a problem. Alternatively for a similar price is the Asus VX229H (21.5" 1920x1080 AH-IPS), though it's slightly smaller at 21.5" it looks a bit more modern and stylish compared to the VS239H. I doesn't have a VESA mount though and only has VGA and HDMI inputs whereas the VS239H has VGA, HDMI and DVI Inputs. Asus VS239H http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236288 Asus VX229H http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236363

50,000 is extremely high for DirectX 11, for context CRYENGINE's recommended maximum drawcall count is 2000 (on the low graphics preset). In my CRYENGINE projects I tried to never push it past 5000 or so. GG Ubisoft. CRYENGINE Performance Docs: http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC3/Asset+Performance+Guidelines

No, not had any issues with it thus far, I have my server in a Fractal Design Define Mini so I can barely hear it.

I recently built a home server to do the same purpose, I'm running a RAID 6 configuration with 4x WD 2TB RED drives using a HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL RAID Card. Performs very well, more than saturates the Gigabit connection of the motherboard, costs around $150-$200. As for drives I wouldn't recommend getting WD Greens or any other regular consumer grade drive for a RAID config, either Seagate's NAS drives or WD Reds would be the best option. As for specifications, I'm running an Ivy Bridge Pentium G2120 3.1Ghz Dual Core with 4GB of Ram I had lying around from a RAM upgrade. You could get away with 2GB, just sitting on the Windows Home Server server desktop the server is using 1.66GB of Ram, but 4GB would be a much better option. As for CPU power if all you're doing is backups and some light media file streaming (no heavy media transcoding to multiple devices at a time) you really don't need much in the terms of performance, with my G2120 it sits a 0% CPU utilization most of time. Another thing you could consider if you want it to be very power efficient is buying an 80+ Gold PSU, Seasonic has a 360W 80+ Gold unit which I'm using in my home server.