Do you think gaming computers will ever reach a point where they are so powerful that it will be near impossible to keep cool or even supply enough electricity to without burning something down causing computer games to reach a stagnate and never have anything groundbreaking? Will programers ever run out of GOOD ideas for new games causing the industry to work in reverse like remakes of old 1972 games like the music industry is doing? And finally. Do you think a PC or console should be purchased over the other? My personal spin on this one is that I would buy a PC for my kid way before a console becuase it stimulates learning. What do you think?

won't stimulate learning if he/she doesn't use it properly. research has been done that video games may also increase intelligence. ASPIRE ATXB4KLW-AL Antec 400W ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe AMD 3700+ San Diego Corsair 1GB 2x512 eVGA 6600GT 250GB Hard Drive Sound Blaster Audigy Windows XP HOME W/SP2

I dont that there ever will be a point where heat will ever be a huge issue. Technologies need to evolve hand in hand to support eachother. Although processors have gotten hotter over the years, the cooling technologies have also been made to fill the void. We will always find new ways to do something diffrently but with the same result. Look at the AMD chips. Although they run cooler and at a lower clock speed they still beat the P4. Things that 40 years ago thought impossible are now more than just a reality. I mean who in 1965 though a man would land on the moon? Nobody. It was outrageous to even think such ideas byt yet in 1969 it was done. The problem is that future technologies are impossible to predict. We usually will go from one to the next without knowing whre it will end if it will end at all. Overall I don think that we even will be using the same type of processors we use now. And if we are there are many ways of increasing power that dont result in increases in heat. There are rarely any new ideas its just the medium that changes for the ideas. There are many orginal games that have comeout in the past few years. The most current I would have to say is Pychonauts, its very diffrent from games you see although its gameplay is similar to that of other games of its genre its artwork and setting make it stand out. Katamari Damacy, a game that came out for PS2 is incredible inventive. It takes the idea of rolling a snowball = when you roll over snow you pick it up, and applies to a game medium where to roll over things and grow bigger and bigger eventually picking up continents. There are always "dry seasons" but dont let you think those will last forever. There weill always be something that will break the mold or surprise everyone , its just a matter of waiting for it. Classics dont come often thats why they're classics. I would say that it depends on the person. Personally I own both to get the best of both worlds. Some games are exculsive to eash medium. Consoles are supreme in fighting and racing games ( there are more I justr cannot think on an) while PCs are the sole choice for people who play strategy games and MMORPGs. Although both can have eachothers ggames one will always do better than the other. First person shootes work on both but ultimatly the Keyboard/Mouse combo wins hands down. RPGs like Final Fantasy are just purly made for consoles and playing them on the pc is very diffrent and feels unnautral. But if it comes down to which is btter for a child it depends on what this is for if its to entrertain a child I would choose consoles specifically the gamecube for its selection of nice kid friendly games. The PC is more of a system for older people with more patience.

"Do you think gaming computers will ever reach a point where they are so powerful that it will be near impossible to keep cool or even supply enough electricity to without burning something down causing computer games to reach a stagnate and never have anything groundbreaking?" Look at a good comparable industry that had to deal with the very same issue - automobiles. People complained and whined about the complexity, maintenance costs, how much more difficult it was to work on, etc. associated with water cooling. I used to work on some old Volkswaggens that were air cooled, and it was a pleasure to work on those compared to most of today's cars. But we went to water cooling in automobiles. As our systems heat up more and more, watch for the industry to adapt. There's little doubt in my mind computers will go as the car industry did - water cooling. It is inevitable. People like me are fighting not to resort to it now because it makes PC's infinitely more difficult to work on, prohibitively expensive, and thankfully unnecessary, but there will come a time that fighting the move to it will be futile, especially with the current backlash against loud computers that will eventually be adopted as a mainstream consideration of consumers when purchasing/building a PC. "Will programers ever run out of GOOD ideas for new games causing the industry to work in reverse like remakes of old 1972 games like the music industry is doing?" Regurgitating ideas in art is part of the dynamic process of an art. All art goes through periods of stagnation, followed by periods of innovation. If you ask me, right now the rock music industry has hit a period of stagnation, as we have exhausted the ideas of the alternative revolution, which was a response to the creative blackhole we were in from hair rock/heavy metal. What is important to understand is regurgitation is part of even innovation. Alternative rock was based on ideas from the late 60's and early 1970's - you don't have to be perfectly on pitch, have your guitars tuned, go on gratuitous long solos to show you can play your instrument well. Same applies to video games - what constitutes innovation? You could say flight sims are poor in innovation because all they do is try to make the sim more realistic. But compare old flight sims to new ones, and you see huge innovations with gfx quality, sound quality, etc. FPS's...ok, so, you got the first person perspective, but what constitutes innovation? Style of gameplay? New weapons? More or less realism? Better graphics? Counterstrike was considered one of the best games ever made, very innovative, but what was really innovative about it? Dying and not coming back, more realistic weapons handling? Rainbox Six beat them to that. Was it the somewhat deathmatch feel? Doom/Quake/HL beat them to that! It was blending the two that made it innovative. But compare Quake 3 to Doom 3? Is there innovation going on here, or simply taking the same concept and dressing it up with better graphics? (Slapping lipstick on the pig as some say.) Comparably, is punk rock music of today simply taking the Ramones and putting on a modern feel/look? In the end, no, I don't think we'll totally run out of good ideas. Did we ever run out of good ideas for books? "President Bush is doing everything he can to lower gas prices, including...making the oil companies so rich that maybe they'll get sick of money."

Simply stated...no. Technology is giving us faster chips that generate less heat, not more. As time passes, cpu's, gpu's and power supply circuits will all become more efficient as will cooling solutions. The introduction of the A64 shows us that raw Mhz don't mean diddly but that technology means blazin' fast. Dual core cpu's will also do well over the next year and all this will spill over to graphics chipsets; especially as portable users are clamoring for cutting edge desktop performance. We'll still see manufacturers "slapping lipstick on the pig" in order to shove a product on the market when it should still be in development but, we're headed in the right direction.

"Technology is giving us faster chips that generate less heat, not more." Is it? Do Athlon 64's generate more or less heat than a 386? The trend in the long run is CPU's are getting hotter and hotter. 15 years ago, a heatsink was sufficient to cool a CPU down. Now a fan is a necessity if air cooling, not to mention retail boxed bundled heatsinks resorted to copper inserts as recently as the Athlon XP 2500 line for a time. Heatsinks and fans have also gotten bigger over the years to get the necessary cooling effects. One reduction in temp from XP to 64 (which incidentally, the A64's have bigger heatsinks to cool better) doesn't convince me that will be what the future holds. "Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, and G. Gordon Liddy don't like Mark Felt. Mark Felt is truly a great man."

"One reduction in temp from XP to 64 (which incidentally, the A64's have bigger heatsinks to cool better) doesn't convince me that will be what the future holds." It should...palomino > tbred a > tbred b > barton > A64 follows a downward trend in chip temps. I know I left the 80386 out of the discussion but I do have an AMD 486DX4-100 overclocked and overvolted that runs as hot as a Cyrix M series chip. Anyway, time will tell...flag this thread so we can come back to it in a year. Skip