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So, I spent half an hour running through a few fairly intensive games (ARMA-2, SR3, GW2, Metro 2033) and the maximum power draw from the wall was 210W, which would be more like 180W internally. Which...

i7-3770: 77W
GTX 660: 130W
SSD + HDD: 10W
Motherboard: 20-30W.

Total: about 250W, so actually less than I'd guessed before. I should really plug the power meter in and see how much it takes...

In theory only a high-end gaming system should need more than 300W (e.g the component power usage in my i7/GTX 660 PC only total to about 280W), but it depends on how much power is available on the...

True. We had a computer doing this at work last week, and replacing the power supply solved it.

Sudden shutdown is normally either an overheating or PSU problem.

Uh, games don't need to 'use hyperthreading', they just need to use enough threads to take advantage of the virtual cores. If GW2 can make use of four real cores it can make use of the four virtual...

But it also has hyperthreading, so its performance is somewhere between a dual and quad core. I ran GW2 acceptably for months on a slower i5 laptop with settings nearly maxed out, though I never...

I don't see what you say WoW offers as good things. The fact that GW2 mostly doesn't have them is the good thing about the game.

You seem to regard grinding for virtual toys as the 'reward' for...

The reward for playing games is meant to be: fun.

Most of the things you're complaining that the game lacks are things many of us don't regard as fun, such as being forced to take a specific route...

I've never played WoW, but I did play EQ2 for a while after playing EQ1 for several years. EQ2's problems were that its graphic requirements were substantially higher than WoW, and it removed many of...

Indeed. Servers today are vastly more powerful than they were 7 years ago. So the game should be much cheaper to run between expansions, particularly as many players will leave and wait for the next...

For current games, no: I've yet to see my i7 get above 25% CPU usage in any game I've checked. For future games, 3D rendering and video editing, probably, since you will be able to run twice as many...

Yeah, that should be pretty good, and just under $1k with Windows included. Does the $885 include tax?

I wouldn't say easy: when I set out to build an 'awesome' gaming PC I ended up at about $2000 (Canadian, so I'd expect it to be a bit less in US dollars) with tax and shipping. I had to scale back...

In addition, old content in most games becomes worthless because everyone levels past it and spends their time in half a dozen zones in the latest expansion. Everquest, for example, must have a...

On that budget you're probably looking at a high-end i5 and an Nvidia GTX 660 or a similar mid-range ATI card. An SSD for fast boot times is likely to be outside your price range too, unless you buy...

In principle that should run the game pretty well, so long as Windows 8 supports it; I have Windows 7, an i7 instead of an i5, more and faster RAM, a Z77 motherboard and more hard drive space, but...

I haven't had a chance to try proper gameplay on my new PC yet, but I've been getting around 60fps running around Lions Arch on a single GTX660 at 1920x1080 with most things maxed. Think I had to...

You say that as though it's a good thing. All it really does is ensure that lots of legislation is passed against the wishes of the voters, often with support from both parties.

Actual vital...

That doesn't seem like a bad deal. I was playing the game OK at 1366x768 on this i5/GT330M laptop until I bought my new desktop system.

BTW, have you checked the fans on your current laptop? My...

Looks to be nearly twice as fast as my laptop (i5 2.27GHz and GT330M), which runs on high at 10-25fps at 1366x768.

I've seen three methods of trying to prevent high-level farming in low-level zones:

1. Ignore it. A high-level can trivially kill low-level mobs en masse. A pain if you're a low-level and the...

Yeah, I tried it but I just couldn't get more than a few steps with my laptop's touchpad. If it wasn't timed, I could probably have done it, but not when I barely had time to move before I died.

But, unless I'm misunderstanding it, the graph shows that only 1/3 of characters are human.

I thought by now everyone knew game journalism bears little resemblance to reality. Even games the review completely slates rarely get less than a 50% rating, and I've bought several 90+% rated games...

I haven't tried to log in tonight, but right now the GW2 twitter feed says "If you're experiencing connection errors, please be patient. It should connect you and start the download."