zeibis

On May 23rd Kalypso's Tropico 5 will release on Steam. On Steam you'll find the game listed for $35.99, which is 10% off the full $39.99 list price. However, there's an even better deal at Green Man Gaming, where that same 10% instant discount combines with a coupon code dropping the price 28%.

 

Use coupon code O3H7FE-D4NFO0-F0LIGK

 

Tropico 5 is $28.80 at Green Man Gaming (list price is $39.99).

 

The coupon will expire on April 22nd at 9am Eastern.

 

In addition to the discount, pre-orders from Green Man will get you a free copy of either Port Royale 3 or Patrician IV (your choice).

*cough* a follow on from this *cough*
 
This is really great news, and its not a repost goml @KakaoDj .
 
So this wasnt expected, im surprised by the specs, the architecture is crazy, they barely use any power.
 
When i saw the amount of cuda cores, memory and clocks i lost it. 
 
But they are here, brace yourselves. 
 
Put on some dramatic music. 
 
Give it up for the
 
GT 705
 
GT 710
 
and lastly
 
the 
GT 720
 
Boosting the uncanny arcs of Fermi and Kelper
 
Relying on the joys of rebadging.
 
This is a great moment indeed.
 
This day should become a international holiday(even though its easter holiday already for some people)
 
Well then what the **** are we waiting for better dive in.
 
First up the gt 705
 

 
This sexy thing is a rebadge of the gt 610 which was a rebadge of gt 520. spicy. 
 
Let me throw some numbers at you
48 CUDA CORES 64 BIT MEMORY BUS a jesus tier of only 29watts under full load An awesome process size of 40nm If i was you id wait for the classified or lightning versions of this card, you could maybe push it up by 1000mhz.
 
Next up the...
 
GT 710
 

 
This lady killer isnt a rebadge of the of Gt 620, whats this madness, its a rebadge of the gt 630, actually no its not, this is a cut down gt 630, madness is it, whatever.
 
Lets get down to the stats
Uses the genetically superior pci-e gen 2.0 lane. supports DX 11 has 512mb of memory, wait a sec thats less then the 705, i guess the AMD marketers went to nvidia for a day. Thats all i can say about that card, I recommed you wait for a sapphire version, even though this is nvidia im sure a 8gb vram version will be arriving soon after launch.
 
LASTLY
 
the new god('s servant),
 
the new flagship(mascot),
 
Here it is the GT 720
 

 
This you might notice is the same as the above card but its superior.
 
Its not a half rebrand, ITS A FULL REBRAND.
 
This card has a full 1gb of vram. If you convert that to bytes its 1.0737 X 10^9 which is a big number, if you tried to count to that number it would take... A LONG TIME.
 
Unlike the ferocity of the above cards, this one is on a whole new level, those cards have a straightly 1 smx unit whereas this dragonslayer has 2 smx units. THATS 200% THE PERFORMANCE, i think.
 
It also has the DNA of the gtx titan, the 680, 770, titan black, titan brown, every voodoo card and that crazy tall guy from fractal.
 
Well then its been great but thats everything ive got today lads, follow EVGA's step up plans because im sure you titan wielders will be gunning for one of these beauties soon.
 
Sources:
 
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2578/geforce-gt-705.html
 
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1990/geforce-gt-710.html
 
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1989/geforce-gt-720.html
 
@LinusTech  You know you love these cards.

I don't have a money tree... yet....

what?
Asrock is a very decent brand, if you OC on a low end board, doesn't matter from who, you will experience issues, but the Fatal1ty 990FX is at the top of the line, it's meant to OC.
Asrock can be as bad as anyone if you are talking about the low end $50 stuff only, Their extreme and pro series are very good products.

A great cooler that I use for my 8350 is the H100i I can push my 8350 to 4.9Ghz on it as a daily overclock and has no problem. 

As someone with an FX 8320, I'd go for a Corsair H80i or if your case can store it with adequate room which I think a 300r should do, get a H100i
Both are under £100 on Amazon.
That's just my two pence

Screen looks amazing and Gorilla Glass 3 should last for few years. Overall a very solid phone.

Flashing an LSI 9211-8i to IT Mode
(might also be useful for flashing other LSI RAID cards)
 
(newbie edition)

"It can't  be that  difficult.", I thought to myself  before starting  this adventure.  "Tons  of people  have  done  it, there  are  quite  a few  tutorials  on it,  this should  be feasible."

Yeah, right...

Seriously though,  it's not actually that  tricky, it's just that the info  I needed to get it done  required quite a bit searching and trial-and-error.
Note:  I put  this in  the storage  subforum  instead of the tutorials because  it's fairly  specific and the  people who might find this useful are  more likely to be lurking around here I'd estimate.
 
 
Disclaimer
 
Flashing your cards can break  them if things go wrong. This post is merely  a documentation on my way to  success, and I provide  this  info in  the  hopes  it  might be  useful  to somebody. However,  I  take  no  responsibility  for  anyone else's misfortunes.
 
Proceed at your own peril.
 
Anyway...
 
FreeNAS Users
@wpirobotbuilder has discovered that FreeNAS already seems to have the  sas2flash utility built in,  check this post for more info.
Windows Users
See this post from  @Danny91 for a small tip about drive spin up and down.

The Objective
I plan  on using this  card in a  server running ZFS  as its main data  file system.  Since  this isn't a ZFS  tutorial I won't go into the details,  but basically ZFS prefers direct access to your disks without  a controller doing any "smart" things in between (like, for example, running a RAID setup).
Often, RAID  cards  will  be  delivered  running in  IR mode (Integrated RAID firmware), and we would like to change that to IT mode  (Initiator  target mode), so that the controller just  acts  as a  host  bus  adapter  without  trying  to do anything smart.
This can  also be desirable  if you're not running  ZFS, for example if you'd like to use software RAID.
In order to  change from IR to  IT mode, we need  to flash a different firmware onto the card.
 
 
What I Used

- motherboard: Asus P8Z68 (yes, the M/B matters)
- a 4 GB USB flash drive
- the file 9211-8i_Package_P17_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows  from LSI's product  site's  "SOFTWARE DOWNLOADS" section on the 9211-8i.
- the file Installer_P17_for_UEFI from LSI's product site's "SOFTWARE DOWNLOADS" section on the 9211-8i
- a precompiled UEFI shell (see below for details)
Sources

I   primarily    followed   the   instructions   from  Bryan Vyhmeister's excellent blog post on this topic, but I needed to do quite a bit of additional research on getting the UEFI shell to  work, which is why I'm creating this tutorial (not that I fault  him for  that, his tutorial is not supposed to be an  UEFI shell primer, after all.  If it hadn't been  for his  post  it  would have  probably taken me many more hours than it did). There's quite a bit more info  I plowed through on my way to the  objective,  but none  of  it  was really  pertinent  to getting the job done.  Also,  for some of  the UEFI  shell files,  I used  the Arch Linux Wiki.

Shall We Proceed?
Alright then, let's get started.
 
Getting the Firmware and BIOS Files for the HBA
 
Note:  Obviously, the  version  numbers  might change in the future.
- Create a FAT partition on the USB drive.
- 9211-8i_Package_P17_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows: Grab the  file  from  LSI's site (doesn't matter if you're running Linux, *BSD or Win)  and  unpack  it. You need the file 2118it.bin, located in the directory Firmware/HBA_9211_8i_IT in the archive.  Of  course  you can also choose to simply update the IR  firmware if you wish, then you'll need that file, located in Firmware/HBA_9211_8i_IR. Either way, copy
the firmware file onto your USB drive.
- You also need to update the card's BIOS for this (at least AFAIK), so also grab the file mptsas2.rom,  located in the directory sasbios_rel inside  the archive. Copy that  file onto your USB drive as well.
- Note:   You  can,  but  don't  need  to,  create  separate directories on your USB drive. In  the end,  we will  only have four files on it, so it doesn't really matter.
- Grab the Installer_P17_for_UEFI  file  from  LSI's website and unpack it.
- Copy the file sas2flash.efi, from in the directory sas2flash_efi_ebc_rel in  the  archive,  onto  your  USB drive,  into  the  same directory  as  the  firmware  and  the BIOS file (yes, I'm aware  you  can  put  all  of the three files at arbitrary locations, but why make things more complicated...).
- That's phase  1 completed, now  all that's left is getting this  to run  on  your  PC. That was actually the trickier part for me...

Getting the UEFI Shell
The first thing that went through my mind when I got to that part of  the tutorial  I linked above  was pretty  much just "WTF?".
I quite frankly had simply never heard of an UEFI shell, let alone  used one,  and  searching the  web  I found  precious little information  about the subject  (and what I  did find was mostly rather technical and  would have required lots of thorough  reading to  understand it,  and even  then it  was doubtful if it was actually going to be of any use to me).
For those  of you who are  also a bit puzzled  by this (then again, maybe I am the only  one), basically the EFI shell is a  command line  interface that  let's you  do basic  system tasks  on your  machine  (yes, I  am aware  that  that is  a very broad   generalization,  but  it  will  suffice for the purposes  of this  tutorial,  otherwise you  are welcome  to start reading docs on the subject).
Unfortunately, depending on your M/B (and that's why the M/B is relevant  in this), you  will require a  different shell, and will need to follow different steps to access it. I have gotten the  impression that  some boards  even come  with an integrated one,  but I'm  not 100%  certain on  that. If you have such  a board, you  can skip  the next part,  since you don't need to download one.

The different  versions of the  shell you're most  likely to need are these:

- For the most current version (the 2.0 branch), go here and select the one which matches your architecture.
- If those do not work for you (and in my case they did not), it might be that your M/B requires an older version, either the X64 or IA32 version.
- The  links  for  the v1 versions  I got from the Arch Linux wiki page here, as mentioned above.
- Copy the EFI shell onto your USB drive as well, I called it  shellx64.efi. I am not  absolutely  certain,  but  the name
  might matter to some extent  to  your M/B, I have also come across simpler names like shell.efi, but I was so glad when I finally got things working I didn't experiment further to
  check which names work and which do not.
 UPDATE: Did another flash, indeed Shell.efi also worked.
 
Flashing the HBA

Mount the  LSI card in your  machine, plug in the  USB drive with all four  files on it (the LSI BIOS,  the firmware, the sas2flash utility and the efi shell), and drop into the BIOS of your machine.

Note: I'm  not an  expert on  this subject,  but I have seen it  recommended to  have  only one  9211-8i  in your  system during this process. Allegedly it's possible to specifically target a  card to flash, but  I couldn't try that  out, so I have no info on that process.

Getting Into the UEFI Shell
This too wil probably depend on your M/B. On mine, there was an option  in the Exit  BIOS menu of  the BIOS which  said  Launch   EFI  Shell  from   filesystem   device.  Basically,  that option  will  search any  devices you  have connected for anything  that might be an EFI  shell and will try to run it.
If you have  the wrong shell or your machine  can't find it, you will fail here  (took me a few tries to  get to the next step...).

Mounting the USB Drive
Once  you're  in  the  shell,  you need  to  mount  the  USB drive  with the  files on  it so  that you  can access  them (obviously).
On   my   machine,   the   first   thing   the   shell   did was   print   a  nice   list   of   all  connected   storage devices,   with  my   USB   drive   labeled   ft0   and   my HDDs and  SSDs labeled  blk... You might need to do a bit of trial  and  error here  to  find  the  right drive,  but  it shouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle.
In my case, mounting the USB drive was done with:


Then I needed to change directories into the drive:
mount ft0: (yes, no 'cd ' or anything like that).
ft0: Inside a directory, you can list the contents with
and change directories with
ls And this is what it looked like for me after that:
cd directory_name (click image for full res)

 
Actually Flashing the Card
This was  actually fairly straightforward. Make  sure you're in the directory with  the BIOS, firmware and sas2flash.efi, and run the following command  to reset the card and prepare it for the new BIOS and firmware.
 
CAREFUL: DO NOT TURN OFF OR REBOOT YOUR MACHINE AT THIS POINT. ALLEGEDLY YOU WILL HAVE A BRICKED CARD ON YOUR HANDS!!!
 
This is what  it looked like during the  erasing process for me. The actual  erasing takes a  while, to be  specific this step:
(click image for full res)

sas2flash.efi -o -e 6 After a successful erase, this is what you should get: (click image for full res)  
 
Then flash it with the new files:   Which should look like this: (click image for full res)
 
You can check if the new flash was successful with:
sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom Which gave me this output: (click image for full res)

sas2flash.efi -listall Alternatively, you can get more detailed info with the -list command.  The  'Firmware Product ID" field  will indicate if the controller is now running in IT mode:
Output for that command:
sas2flash.efi -list (click image for full res)

 
NOTE: You  can  also check  if the sas2flash utility detects your card(s) properly with the listall command  before you start the  whole process. If the card  doesn't show  up  here,  you won't  be  able to  start flashing in the first place.

You can then  leave the UEFI shell with  exit and  should be back in your M/B's BIOS.
To  make sure  your  card is  now in  IT  mode, reboot  your machine and it should get  displayed when the card's BIOS is run.

As you  can see, it  is not  actually all that  complex, but there are  a hilarious many  things that can refuse  to play ball in this, and sorting out  those from the ones that work took quite  a bit  of effort. If you  search around  the web for  flashing  this  card  you will  find  many  alternative procedures,  and  depending  on your  setup  (hardware,  the version of  sas2flash you're using, which  firmware type and version you're wanting to flash  onto the card etc.) some of them might actually work for you.  For me, however, this was the only one that lead  to success. Thanks to Bryan's post I was able to save lots of time in finding out which files and tools I needed,  but then I was stuck quite  a while on that whole UEFI  shell thing. Once I  had that up and  running it was a pretty painless process though.
If you find  any errors please point them  out. I wrote down what I did quite carefully  during the process (primarily to make sure I  could reproduce it with a second  card should I ever buy  one), but  I'm not infallible,  so there  might be undesired entropy lurking somewhere.

Thanks for reading!

So long
-aw
 

On the WAN Show this week he researched a fuckton and he pulled together all this info and created probably the most well reasoned, balanced, and rational viewpoints on Oculus. He gave us all the information and tried to give most viewpoints and his personal opinion, but he tried to frame it in a way to where we created our own opinion.

It is very possible to do it but god damn you are going to need some serious soldering skills.

There are plenty of things that I can't not purchase without killing a dragon and offering my first born child as sacrifice that are just too difficult to get legitimately that I get off of TPB. Thing usually get pirated when they're really difficult to get anyways.

Not like any of us were going to go pirate things... Right guys? Heh, heh, RIGHT guys?

I second that choice.

My Mantle graphs unfortunately don't seem to have made it into the final video...
 
Here they are just in-case you were interested! http://imgur.com/a/s3lud

i doubt AMD would even require them to credit them they can only gain by more developers adopting an API that makes their CPUs relevant for gaming.

''That suit is NOT BLACK''
 
-Borat
 
 
So just a 780ti with more ram and Double Precision enabled...

Hard to say to be honest. G-SYNC requires a fancy new monitor that isn't available yet.
 
Mantle requires a fancy new graphics card or APU (to really get the most of it), a shoddy CPU, and games that aren't available yet.
 
My enthusiasm for both has been damped significantly since my initial excitement.

Well, on average it`s about 5-15%, depends on level and graphical settings. I think from Mantle the most increase will be if you use two or three cards in CF with a very strong CPU.
 
That would be next thing for Linus to test, 3960X with 2x 290X and 3x 290X and same with lower end cards like 280X and 270X in CF

Graphics wont be a problem with few patches but nvidia wont use Mantle.

One for 120v and the other for 220v

Darksiders 2

Would I have to tweak it at all like to make the card the same

Not a wise expenditure IMO. Get a Barracuda or Caviar Blue, use the saved $ and what you would spend on the cache SSD and buy a 120GB SSD to be the primary drive.
 
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks
Storage:  Sandisk ReadyCache 32GB 2.5" Solid State Disk  ($39.99 @ Microcenter)
Storage:  Western Digital WD VelociRaptor 250GB 2.5" 10000RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($90.86 @ Amazon)
Total: $130.85
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-02-06 02:38 EST-0500)
 
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks
Storage:  Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk  ($69.99 @ Newegg)
Storage:  Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $129.98
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-02-06 02:40 EST-0500)

"windows 8.1 is such an upgrade for anyone using a pc. It is so easy to upgrade anyone can do it." - microsoft
"I can't install windows 8.1 after trying all day and asking the new ceo of microsoft to help me." - Bill Gates.

The Golden Rule of PC.

When something new launches, never jump on it immediately.