Don't get me wrong; custom water cooling can be awesome, but it's not for the newly initiated. So if we nix custom water cooling, we're left with all-in-one water coolers versus aftermarket air cooling, and in that comparison air is the clear winner -- generally less expensive, and less hassle in the installation. (You don't need to find a place in your case for a radiator.) Temperature-wise, performance is basically the same, with air even occasionally winning. Obviously agreed -- but as long as you stick with the lower-end-platform (LGA 1150/1151), the (4-core) i7 is at least a defensible decision. This isn't just about hyperthreading; GalacticKegger's build featured a $1,000 8-core i7 extreme edition processor. Unless he's doing professional/semi-professional work on that rig, it looks like he just bought the most expensive components he could find, without regard for how they fit together. And that's fine if that's what he wants to do, but I'd take his advice with a grain of salt. It isn't just about the money, either. If you want to drop more than 2 grand on a gaming computer, there are better ways to do it. Take $700 off the processor to buy a nice monitor, for example, or drop that money on a second high-end GPU, and/or buy a crapton of RAM, or a bigger SSD, or a genuinely top of the line PSU. You could very easily build a rig that'd run most any current game flawlessly for the cost of that processor, alone. Remember that there are diminishing returns the higher up the cost curve you go. Buying at the bleeding edge is a valid choice if you're a huge enthusiast, but it is a trade off; you're not gonna get good value. And that goes double if you don't keep firmly in mind your intended use case. In the OP's case, and in the absence of more information -- his target budget, what kind of monitor(s) he's running -- I can't recommend a particular build. I can tell him to read up on tomshardware, anandtech, and techpowerup for general info, and jonnyguru for PSU reviews. Marketing in the PSU world is particularly misleading. My rule of thumb is to stick with Seasonic. YMMV.

Right, and the last time I checked, aftermarket air coolers were more or less as effective as all-in-one liquid cooling. Main reason to use the latter is noise, and even that's not always a slam dunk, as the water cooler's radiator requires fans. I don't know if GalacticKegger's build was his first, but his build is massive, massive overkill for gaming. If you do hardcore video encoding/editing or some other semi-professional task, a high-end platform might be worthwhile, but for gaming, a ~$250 core i5 will get you 99+% of the performance of any CPU in existence. So when reading about computer hardware, keep in mind that there's a tendency on the part of enthusiasts, in any field, to lose perspective -- and an even larger tendency on the part of newly initiated enthusiasts. You don't need liquid cooling any more than you need a $1,000 cpu. For the vast majority of consumer use cases, neither one of those things is likely to provide any noticeable benefit, at all. You also don't need a top-tier GPU to play SWTOR, but buying a gtx 980 is at least a defensible decision if you're really interested in gaming, particularly at higher-than-1080p resolutions.

"Nickled and dimed" implies that the amount of any singular fee or charge is insignificant, but that the total experience (the sum of all fees/charges, or perhaps just the character of a service's marketing) feels exploitive. Personally, I don't mind the $10 or $20 for Makeb; it seems like a reasonable price for an expansion or adventure pack or whatever you want to call it. What I'm more concerned about is the $15 I'm slated to pay next month, and the $200+ I've already sunk into the game. I can understand why people are upset by Makeb, not because it costs too much, but because of the game's somewhat rocky history. And yeah, I do think we (we being the subscriber base) are getting nickled and dimed with respect to character customization. For example, the fact that EAWare is pumping out recolored armor sets for the Cartel Market suggests to me that we will either never see a dye option in-game, or that the dye option will be an extraordinarily expensive Cartel-Market-exclusive. That's really disappointing. The fact that Bioware is asking me to buy a relatively cheap expansion without even disclosing the expansion's features or its release date is a mildly annoying, but ultimately incidental problem. The reason I refuse to preorder the expansion isn't that I can't afford it, or that I think the price is unreasonable in a vacuum. On the contrary, I refuse to preorder the expansion because I have no idea if I'll be even the slightest bit interested in playing SWTOR next week, much less in April.

Don't even need a 3D package to recolor existing meshes. Recoloring the texture (and making it look right) might be somewhat trickier than we'd think, though. ("Somewhat tricky" as in maybe two hours in Photoshop.) Still, all of the recolored armors in this game tend to suggest that we'll never see any sort of dye system. That's really disappointing.

Yes, the developers decided that it wouldn't do to have new players see how hideous the helms are in this game until they're well and truly hooked.

Though I agree that the game should allow female characters to use the tallest male height, it's not a stereotype. Men are generally taller than women, and thus the tallest men will almost always be significantly taller than the tallest women. The developers' mistake has very little to do with sexism; it has much more to do with the fact that Bioware heavily underestimated how important character customization is in an MMO. SWTOR flat-out sucks at character customization across the board. Some idiot in Austin probably thought that adding real-world-reminiscent limits on the relative size of females would help to immerse players, but unfortunately the opposite tends to be true: players will generally be more inclined to stay with an MMO if they can customize their characters to feel like unique individuals. And yeah, apologies to BW if the word, "idiot," is a little harsh -- but seriously; I'm about fed up. It would be one thing if the game just sucked at character creation (it does), but that's just the tip of the ice berg here. Bioware spent a year showing us armor models in advertisements, trailers, on NPCs, and even the freaking character-creation screen that are unattainable for players in the game proper. And now, after a year of empty promises, EA/Bioware suddenly introduces some of the most-requested cosmetic options as $15 microtransactions. And if that isn't bad enough, the $15 doesn't even give you the outfit on more than one character. $15 doesn't even give you an outfit that you can transfer to a different character. Yeah. Sorry for the mini, off-topic rant. I came back to this thread because I was heartened to see Hickman finally address the SGR crowd in his latest state of the game speech. I was also a little disappointed on your behalf, because what's coming in Makeb doesn't sound like it even scratches the surface of what SGR advocates have justifiably expected.

Whatever number results in comfortable temperatures. Honestly, there's no hard-and-fast answer. Your card might not even be all that sensitive to high frame rates. My 8800m GTX was; if I got much beyond 60 FPS the card would shoot well north of 80 degrees Celcius -- but only in SWTOR. YMMV. Sorta to echo the above: in this context, we're discussing FPS only as FPS relates to heat. What constitutes a good FPS is a largely subjective performance question, but I'd say that 40ish FPS is playable. Heh, well baby steps. Opening the chassis is (or should be) fairly simple. Blowing out the fans (make sure you hold them still when you use the compressed air because spinning fans the wrong way can hurt them), cleaning the vents, and even cleaning the exterior surfaces of the heat sinks -- all of that is pretty easy stuff. All you (should) need is a screwdriver, a few Q-tips, and a bottle of 90+% pure rubbing alcohol. Removing a GPU heatsink can be much trickier, by contrast, depending on the model and so on. I wouldn't attempt that without making absolutely sure you know what you're doing. The following is a good site for all things notebook: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ A quick search to find out which chassis your laptop uses turned up nothing. Best I can figure is that a company called Compal might make HP's laptops. In any case, if you browse around notebookreview, you'll find guides for servicing various laptops; you might not be able to find a guide to your exact model, but if you read through you should be able to familiarize yourself with the general process of opening the thing up and cleaning out the dust. Heh, good. The only thing is that your laptop apparently has dynamic GPU switching; when you're in 2D mode (browsing the web, etc), your Core i7 handles the graphics to reduce power consumption (and heat). So your GPU may in fact be going straight from off to full load every time you fire up SWTOR. I'm not sure exactly how to control that feature; it's possible that the power options in Windows will do the trick. Or maybe you need to fiddle with it in the BIOS -- but even if the BIOS controls your GPU switching, your BIOS may not expose an option to control it. Laptop BIOS options are notoriously limited, sad to say. But on the upside, having a backup video option isn't a bad thing.

A couple of generic suggestions based on my experience playing around with so-called gaming laptops (which can work, don't get me wrong, but they're generally a bad value proposition unless you absolutely require mobility) -- 1. Cap your frame rate; either use V-sync or use a third party program like Dxtory to do it. 2. Make sure your power options are set to high performance; it's possible that your internal fans are running at lower-than-optimal speed due to your OS's generic power-saving features. Failing that, you might try a utility like MSI Afterburner to manually set your GPU fan to run at full tilt while you're playing. 3. Always monitor your temperatures. I'm assuming you already do this, but it's worth emphasizing and re-emphasizing. Related to #1, it might also be worthwhile to monitor your frame rates (control + shift + F in SWTOR); if they run really high (as they can do, even on relatively low-powered hardware, in certain places like the character select screen), then you know that your FPS-capping isn't working and can quickly fix it. 4. Make sure your chassis is free of dust. I'm sure you already know this, but again it's worth emphasizing. If you're feeling adventurous, you might try removing your heatsinks and re-applying aftermarket thermal paste. I wouldn't recommend that unless you're really confident about the process, though. 5. Try to give your video card time to warm up and cool off before/after applying a heavy workload. Some cards can fail after a time simply because the drastic change in temperature between off/idle and load states stresses the soldering, until finally the PCB cracks. It's not necessarily the amount of heat that'll kill your card; it might be the variation in heat. (This problem was more prominent a few years ago with mobile nVidia cards, which had defective/weak soldering. I was the not-so-happy owner of one such part. Anyway, I don't know how important the issue is these days, but it can't hurt to smooth the transition between heat levels. It's not that hard to leave the computer on for a few minutes after you finish gaming, after all.) If after all of that your card is literally over-heating (that is, throttling down because it's too hot, heating up beyond the rated maximum temperature), then you have a defective product and should take steps to return/replace it. If the card is just getting uncomfortably hot, making you nervous, then I'm sad to say it's probably working as intended. (EDIT to add: if all else fails and you're simply desperate to play SWTOR, then you can build a perfectly serviceable gaming desktop box for about $500 -- not including monitors, keyboards, etc, of course.)

Why don't you go to culinary school before you express an opinion about a restaurant? Why don't you become a Hollywood director before you express an opinion about a movie? Why don't you start up a car company before you express an opinion about an automobile? Your reasoning is often trotted out, and it's always silly, no matter the context. It's an appeal to authority, through which industry pros are automatically presumed correct simply because they're in a given industry -- and that appeal to authority by definition refutes any notion of business competition. After all, customers are the final deciders of a business' success or failure, and customers generally don't have intimate knowledge of the relevant industry. The quoted statement bespeaks, in other words, a profoundly naive and childish rationale, which is ironic because the people who tend to embrace that rationale also implicitly accuse their opponents of naivete, by pointing out the blindingly obvious -- that businesses aren't charities. Of course businesses aren't charities. We all know that. We also, I think, generally agree that $10 or $20 isn't a matter of life and death. Personally, I don't have a problem with Makeb's pricing, but I do feel a little put out generally about EA's apparent new approach to running the game. Some of the prices on the Cartel Market seem silly to me, for example -- ~$15 for a virtual outfit that can only be worn by a single character, can't be transferred, and can't be dyed/retinted? And that comes after Bioware spent a year+ showing us hood-down Jedi armors in trailers and advertisements and never once offered us a viable option for it in the game. (Hell, the Knight's costume in the character creator is still the best looking armor for that class in the game, IMO, and it's still not available. Aesthetically speaking, it's all downhill from the moment you click, "Create character.") For a long time, you could at least argue that the rationale behind giving various classes absolutely ridiculous constraints vis-a-vis their physical appearance had to do with PvP -- and yet as soon as EA thinks it can milk its faithful players for extra cash, Bioware releases adaptive armor that allows any class to look like any other. So anyway, to go back to Makeb: I will buy Makeb. I'm happy to have an extra planet. But I object to the idea that any criticism of a $10 product must imply that the criticizer is a poverty-stricken wastoid. I've spent about $250 in the last year on this game, and I continue to pay $15 per month; any purchasing decision I make going forward must be framed in that context. Yes, MMOs provide very good value in terms of entertainment/hour -- but a lot of MMOs go out of their way to inflate the hours too. And a lot of MMO publishers, of games past and present, seem to be a little less transparently grabby than EA seems intent to become.

Yeah, when your frame rate drops in a crowded fleet instance (for example), that's your CPU, and there's basically no way around it. The OP has a good CPU, but he'll notice dips in extremely crowded areas even so. Still, those dips shouldn't be crippling. The talk about the PCI slot is overwrought. If he's running a Core i5, and as long as he isn't running a tiny mini-ITX build, his motherboard will take any PCIe graphics card in existence. Whether his power supply will be sufficient is another question entirely -- and the answer is probably not. HIs PSU probably doesn't even have a PCIe connector, in which case the best card he could hope to use is an HD 7750 (see here. That card would probably suffice for SWTOR, even on relatively high settings, if the OP is willing to play at lower resolutions.

The meta-game is strong with this one.

My point was that there isn't an infinite supply of gold. People who sell gold items have to adjust the price of those items based on the cost of materials, and gold is a very costly material. That's why your analogy's flawed. I'm not interested in debating whether gold is valuable to a starving man in a desert; that's less than irrelevant.

Yes, but the question is whether EA will earn more money by increasing its sales' volume (lowering prices). Your point about perceived value through rarity is only tenuously related, because the items we're discussing are only artificially rare (whereas gold is unavoidably and existentially rare). Yes, some items in SWTOR should be kept exceedingly rare for vanity purposes, but what should constitute a vanity item isn't cut-and-dried. Should the only hood-down jedi robes in the entire game be high-end vanity items, or are they -- as the design suggests, given that they're wearable at level 1 -- simply an extension of the character creator, a means by which people can suit their look to their characters' story? Those two categories -- vanity and character customization -- aren't necessarily synonymous. We're not talking about the infamous EVE Online monocle here; we're talking about the general pricing of outfits. Uniqueness -- the ability to preen in front of other players -- is important, but it's not the only factor involved in a customer's decision to purchase an outfit. If you think a retinted armor skin or a similar-to-every-other-armor-but-for-the-hood's-placement outfit should be a status symbol, then we have an irreconcilable difference of opinion. You draw the status symbol line in a different place than I do, but rest assured, whether you realize it or not, you do draw that line somewhere.

In the real world, gold has intrinsic value. If there were an infinite supply of gold-plated bathtubs, then they would be dirt cheap. I'm not saying that your opinion on EA's pricing is wrong, but that analogy doesn't hold water (no pun intended): Once an item has been designed in SWTOR, there is literally zero overhead to produce more of that item. Tuning the price from that point forward is purely a matter of maximizing revenue over time. EDIT: Our thread -- which was about the pricing of cosmetic items in the Cartel Market, has been folded into a thread about the expansion. So if my post seems out of place, that's why.

The irony is that SWTOR's outfits would be far more valuable if you could recolor them, even if recoloring them cost money. I know next to nothing about Vindictus, and I have zero interest in downloading and installing the game just to check their pricing. What I can tell you is that DCUO, STO, and COH sold vastly superior character customization options that were account-wide. And usually, those options were cheaper than the closest analogues we see in SWTOR. Time will tell the story here. All we can do in the meanwhile is give our feedback.