Jozzle

It's also expensive to lay-off someone who's worked for a company for 15 years. The longer their service, the higher the severence pay etc. If you balance employee experience and cost of seperation, I thought they would have kept him.

RH00D is right, it's not the same as being fired. Even with redundancy/severance pay etc, it's still a pretty extreme move to axe that many jobs.

News just breaking on the BBC - Microsoft cutting 18,000 jobs, mostly from Nokia. The largest ever job cut in its history. From the quote by Satya Nadella, what exactly would shifting focus towards "online service, apps and devices" mean for the company? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28348223 Joe

Now one of these would be extremely useful right now...

Thanks again to the both of you for the PSU advice and you're completely right about it being overkill. In terms of lighting, I'm going to aim for something quite subtle, but enough to show up the detail inside. It's going to be a fine balance to not have it all hidden in darkness inside the desk and not having it lit up like Piccadilly Circus. In terms of colour, I like the effect of UV Blue so I may try and find some combination of the UV to highlight tubing/fluid and some soft white lighting purely to allow the inside to be seen.

Thanks for the reply. The forum is actually the Overclockers UK forum and the guy has called it 'Ethos/Cube Desk Awesomeness' or something to that effect. That sounds pretty good with the RAM - the Dominator Platinum was one that I had my eye on. And you're right with the PSU, although I would probably stick to the Corsair 'i' series because from what I hear they are extremely good. Thanks, Joe

Good afternoon, For a while now I've been planning a full system upgrade as mine is getting quite old now... Intel E8500. Anyway, it has had some upgrades to the GPU and I've installed an SSD since then and, day-to-day, it actually runs very well with it's 3.8GHz overclock and, to perform most tasks, it wouldn't be obviously terrible - mainly thanks to keeping things streamlined since the upgrade to Windows 7 and SSD. Even Photoshop is pretty snappy so there's no problem there. The small issues come when trying to use Premiere Pro and After Effects. Rendering videos and effects is just not good at all and lately I am getting more work in that area as well as producing my own material. If I don't fancy sitting through extremely long render times, I have to edit on my laptop, which is about as good an Alienware M15x as could be bought a couple of years ago with the 920xm etc and it does all of this much faster than the desktop... BUT... it's a laptop and editing on it is enough to make me want to jump off of something high... So, it's upgrade time. I often have pretty ambitious plans when it comes to anything and this is no exception. The exception this time however is I plan to do it right and make something really epic. A fully integrated, watercooled desk build. A corner curved desk with a glass panel top (with a wooden border) and the entire system laid out inside. I've seen a couple of people online who have done similar things, but most haven't been that impressive. There is a current build log on another forum here in the UK which is shaping up to be extremely good and from which I got the real inspiration to do it this way, after seeing a lot of mediocre specimens. The specs for the planned system are a little in flux still, but the general idea will be: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Intel 3930k with some overclocking goodness going on 32GB of as-yet undecided RAM (Opinions welcome) nVidia GTX 670 2x Samsung 840 Pro in Raid 0 (Capacity as yet undecided) 4x WD 7200rpm 2TB (Exact spec not fully decided) Corsair 1200i PSU Water blocks for CPU, Mobo and GPU ​I'm thinking of using EK Waterblocks although it's just an initial thought but I do quite like the aesthetics of the range of products available. Some variety of large radiator with 4 fans etc The specifics of the water loop aren't essential right now as things are still in the initial planning phase. I currently have a GTX 560ti running in the existing system after the 9800 GX2 blew up on me so it may well get salvaged and used for something... possibly just running a second monitor purely for running previews in Premiere Pro and other minor tasks. The main purpose of this Topic is to see if anyone has done anything similar and generally see what people think of the idea. It's going to be a pretty long process due to finances which do insist on getting in the way of everything! There isn't a fixed budget though... it's just a situation of when there's money around, things will get purchased. Joe P.S. In case you didn't catch it, I'm in the UK