This land is truly cursed. Rivers of poison, filled with demonic bile, eat away at the earth. Ancient wyrms, terrible and great, slumber quietly within the mire. Perhaps you know of a dragon slayer, jobless, up for hire.
http://www.battle.net/war3/maps/war3xbonusmaps.shtml
Download the Battle.net session 2 2v2 champion replay:
http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/war3x/replays/w3season2/2-2finals1.zip
Based on my studies on the LCD vs CRT. Although generally LCD monitors having poorer performance as compared to CRT, here some of the guideline for you to purchase the LCD if you want to outperform CRT
Contrast: get the contrast 700:1
Viewing angle: more than 150°
Defective Pixel: must get as low as possible
Possible resolution: at least 1024x768
Pixel response time: 4ms
Are you planning to upgrade your computer? Still lost which processor to go for?
If you are using the Pentium 4 Socket 478 Processor, running at 2.4G and above, my personal advice is not to upgrade the computer at this moment.
The performance of the current processor upgrading is not obvious, as you may notice for the past 2 years, the processor clock speed is selling at 2.4G to 3.4G in the market. Nothing has been obviously changed in the past 2 years, despite increasing of the L2 cahce speed from 512K to 1M and 2M and etc.
I have done some benchmarking based on my processor bought in March 2004, which is 1.5 years ago from now. I have made some comparison based on the Sandra Sisoft benchmarking and found that there is totally no obvious changed in the performance. Perhaps I shall say that the performance may be increased, but it will not be observed by your eyes or sense...
See how my computer run almost same speed as Pentium 4 3.6Ghz at 1M L2 Cache? The real advantage of 1M Cahce remain a question.
The good upgrade alternative is dual core. Only dual core processor can let you "see" the performance changes. However, the price of the Dual Core isnt cheap at this moment.
I shall expect that the next generation after Dual Core shall be our long waiting Pentium 5.. :) or AMD K9 ?
Download dota 6.13 here ...
http://fasterfiles.com/file.php?id=1156
Discuss further about dota strategies here...
http://p2.forumforfree.com/dota-discussion-vf5-clanbala.html
Found one of the benchmarking from tomshardware.com, comparing the benchmark of the graphic card (APG). Perhaps, it serve a good guide for all to decide which graphic card to go for and which has better performance than another.
Check out the latest solo win against Clan AUS, posted by Dashz in the forum.
http://p2.forumforfree.com/solo-win-against-clan-aus-grunt-vt66-clanbala.html
The In House Tournament Score Chart has been posted in the Clan forum. Please take a look here.
"Noble countrymen, evil is upon us. Darkness has befallen our shores. Rise and slay thy enemies… strike, strike so others shall live. The meek shall not fade into the night… live my brethren, live." – King Terenas
Download Terenas Stand
" Warcraft III Battle.net Ladder ResetAraxas on August 8, 2005
Details for the upcoming Ladder Season Three will be revealed in a few weeks. To accomodate this new season, all Warcraft III ladders will be reset soon. The precise date for both the new season and the ladder reset will be announced in the near future. "
This is the second time of resetting, which mean, all players will have level 0 and start from fresh. Your total played record and statistic will be remained.
Please take this opportunity to rush for the ladder rank and we might become the rank #1 for all AT .. at least for first few days ... lol
Frozen rain 10-8-2005, 17.10pm, Selangor Malaysia ...
Frozen Throne effect !
nForce4 chipset now come with SLI x16, supporting both AMD and Intel processor. Read futher review here.
Clan BALA Arranged Team (AT) defeated Clan Surrender 0r Die [S0D] Chieftain.
Second Clan Chief we defeated in AT.
Player from BALA = Magicbreaker and The_Chieftain.
Download here
Which laptop good for gaming? Here the benchmarking of laptop for your reference. Laptop suitable to play warcraft 3? Posted a review of the TravelMate 3200 in a forum. Read here.
Here is the updates of the Clan Bala In House Tourney. This update was posted early today instead of Monday is because 6-Aug is Chieftain's birthday !!! haha !!!
We, Clan Bala is glad that there are more and more members play 1v1 solo for the tourney, more and more positive direction towards the good game. We see improvement among the members and 长江后浪推前浪, more and more new good players.
Treat this as a practice among us, a friendly match among us... sometime, 结果并不重要, 过程才有意思, 有意义.
See this exciting match between Magicbreaker and xxjiangchengxx, both Undead races play a good close game !!!
Download the replay here:
http://www.angelfire.com/wa3/clanbala/bala-elf_vs_jiang.w3g
Keep up the good works BALA!!!
Clan Bala defeated Clan NTL who is currently rank 2 in Clan Ladder.
Congrats.
Download and see the replay here
WCG 2005 Official Maps for Warcraft 3, Frozen Throne
Lost Temple (Reign of Chaos)
- Suggested Players: FFA, 2vs2- Size: Medium- Tileset: Lordaeron Summer - Ringed by gold mines, the Fountain of Health beckons. Expand quickly or risk being crushed by your opponents.
Turtle Rock
- Suggested Players: 1v1, 2vs2- Size: Small- Tileset: Lordaeron Summer - Once an island for all those who were exiled, this has now become an island of riches for those who seek its hidden treasures. .
Twisted Meadows
- Suggested Players: 1v1, 2vs2, FFA- Size: Medium- Tileset: Lordaeron Summer - The path twists, and the future is uncertain. Race for the center and the treasures it might hold, or visit a Goblin Laboratory and explore one of the small islands.
Echo Isle
- Suggested Players: 1v1- Size: Small- Tileset: Lordaeron Summer - Though these islands are surrounded by deep and treacherous waters, they have seen little peace. Many of the creatures dwelling here are refugees from the war. They have nothing left to lose. Don't expect a warm welcome.
WCG2005 Singapore Championship registration is now opened.
Venue: Suntec Exhibition Hall 401
National Finals: 8th - 11th Sept 2005
Limited slots are available.
Registration Fees:
Single Player Game - $12Team Game - $50
Prizes and goodie bag details can be found here.
Manual registration (Cash only): Date: 4th/5th August 2005
Venue: Nanyang Auditorium, NTU Time: 1130am - 5pm
Online registration (eNETS only):
*Limited slots are available for all games and registration is based in a first come first served basis.
Sign up now at http://sg.worldcybergames.com/register.html
MSI has released its first Geforce 7 graphic card, this graphic card was being tested and the result was posted in the http://www.anandtech.com/ claiming to out-performed most of the graphic card with the same chipset.
The spec of the MSI Geforce 7800GTX as follows for your reference:- [extracted from www.msi.com]
Geforce 7800GTX Chipset Features
NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 Shading Architecture
Vertex ShadersPixel Shaders
Next-Generation Texture Engine
DirectX and S3TC texture compressionFull 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending
Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions
NVIDIA Intellisample™ 4.0 Technology
Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (up to 128 Taps)
Rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible edge quality
Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
Fast z-clear
Support for normal map compressionNew transparent super-sampling and transparent multi sampling Anti-Aliasing modes
NVIDIA UltraShadow™ II Technology
Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games, like id Software's Doom 3
SLI Technology
Patented hardware and software technology allows two GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance
Scales performance on over 60 top PC games and applications
NVIDIA nView® multi-display support for scalable performance across two displays
NVIDIA PureVideo™ Technology
Three dedicated video engines
H.264 hardware assist
Industries most advanced video algorithm
DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080p resolution
Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pure down
Display gamma correction
Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple videowindows with full video quality and features in each window
Advanced Display Functionality
Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability
Advanced Engineering
Designed for PCI Express x16
Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory
Advanced thermal management and thermal monitoring delivers cooling at 24dB
NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control™ (DVC) 3.0 Technology
DVC color controls
DVC image sharpening controls
Key Specifications
430MHz core clock speed
1.2GHz 256MB GDDR3 memory
256-bit memory interface
38.4GB/s memory bandwidth
24 pixels per clock
10.32Bps Fill Rate
8 Vertex Pipes
860M vertices/second
400MHz RAMDACs
NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 engine
Intellisample 4.0 technology
64-bit FP texture filtering & blending
NVIDIA SLI Ready
DX 9.0 / SM 3.0 & OpenGL 2.0 supported
Catalyst 5.7 has been released in July 2005. As stated in the Catalyst 5.7 release note, this new driver has resolved the warcraft III issue, “playing the game under Windows XP no longer results in display corruption being noticed when rotating the display 90degrees counter-clockwise”
However the known issue of this new driver with the Worold of Warcraft as stated “Display corruption is noticed when switching between the game and the Windows desktop, when the desktop is set to 1280x1024 and the graphic preferences is set to Optimal Quality.”
Indicated by ATI that there is a performance improvement as stated:
· 5-15% gains in 3DMark05 on some products
· 20-60% gain in Far Cry Regulator across multiple settings
· 25-60% gains in Half-Life 2 at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF
· 40-60% gains in UT2004 at 1600x1200 6xAA 16xAF
· 50-100% improvement in Comanche4 at 1600x1200 6xAA 16xAF
· 50-200% gains in certain ShaderMark tests at high resolution
In my opinion, the indication of the increased of the performance normally varied from computers depends on the manufacturer of the graphic card as well as the overall components of the computers, and the software application.
We are inviting all to participate the Clan Bala logo designing.
Please refer to http://p2.forumforfree.com/designing-of-clan-bala-logo-vt19-clanbala.html for more information.
The processor chip technology has gone to the new era after the 64bit technology. Now everyone is talking about the dual core processor. I have found few interesting website which they have done some testing on Intel Dual and AMD dual, as comparison in terms of performance, stability, performance cost per watt and etc.
Do take note that the wattage consumption is not cheap by using the dual core processor. As the consistent gamers like us, I believe we need to think twice before investing on such technology.
The followings are some summary which extracted from the website. Article extracted from http://www.tomshardware.com/ arthur: Frank Völkel, Bert Töpelt, Daniel Schuhmann.
Proud to inform that Clan Bala website is already listed in yahoo search engine. Type " Clan Bala" in the yahoo search, you are able to see the search link in yahoo machine !
Let us drop more info in forum and posting more replays in the website, to make the clan web become popular.
Latest updates of In-House Tournament. Please note that this result will be updates weekly on Monday in future.
We encourage more players shall take this opportunity to learn from each other by playing more games.
Good luck.
The following are some anslysis of the AGP and PCI Express Video Card. I have read various such article before, and most of the review has proven that the latest technology does not mean is better than old technology, perhaps is only the way the manucturer to gain more on the profit margin.
Analysis: AGP on PCI Performance Penalty Likely Mis-Represented:
A true AGP-on-PCI solution is going to lack a GART driver and be limited to only 33 MHz of shared-bus PCI. In the majority of the tests moving from AGP .67 to AGP 1x and installing GART made the most difference out of any change. Any AGP-on-PCI solution on a standard PCI slot is going to be even more bandwidth limited (.5x AGP vs. our .67x) and hence, crippled from the start. The loss of GART is an additional performance whack that’ll hit performance far harder than 20%.
Even assuming motherboard manufacturers used an expensive, PCI-X solution, there’s still the problem of no GART and the fact that PCI-X is still a shared bus implementation. Using ANY 33-MHz PCI card on such a board would promptly prevent the PCI-X bus from running at its standard 66 MHz. A 33 MHz, 64-bit PCI-X-AGP card would have roughly AGP 1x bandwidth, and thus most games would be playable--but a considerable number of titles want 2x at a minimum to really see performance--and of course, there's the loss of GART.
Given the bandwidth chokepoint and lack of drivers we’d expect any AGP-on-standard-PCI solution to cut performance 50-70% in almost any game or professional application. Even UT2K3 will throttle downwards if AGP bandwidth is cut severely enough. AGP on PCI-X would offer more bandwidth and higher raw performance, but also packs its own penalties.
Bottom line? You’re probably going to be better off staying away. Far away. Very far.
Conclusion: PCI-Express on Desktop Likely to Offer Very Little Performance:
Is PCI-Express a bad idea? Not at all. It cuts manufacturing costs and simplifies trace design; from that perspective alone it’s a smart advance. But don’t confuse “smart advance” with “performance advantage.” Based on the numbers we’ve seen here, the average game and application (even the modern ones) typically do not take advantage of AGP 8x. None of our games showed more than a small increase. Professional applications are a different story, there we saw boosts of 30-40%. Its also been suggested that certain specified applications, like video editing, might run more smoothly over the PCI-Express system.
For the gamer, however, PCI-Express is going to be a non-issue. Given that most games today barely stress the AGP 2x bus, moving to double AGP 8x isn’t going to do anything. It’s the equivalent of widening a highway no one drives on. Had AGP developed in the direction it was intended to things might be different, but it didn’t. Now, to some extent, it’s a solution to a problem no one has.
If you’re still running on an original Athlon, P3, or Socket 423 P4, than a PCI-Express system might not be a bad idea, but if you’ve got something newer and aren’t using a specialized application demonstrated to gain from PCI-E, we wouldn’t bother planning to upgrade. You’ll just be throwing money away after hype. The reality is, in many cases we're barely pushing AGP 2x, sometimes 4x. 8x, despite now being two years old, is mostly hot air.
[article extrated from http://www.sudhian.com, original arthur by Joel Hruska.]
