NP, BTW....60ms, or about 1/16th of a second would be well and truly noticed....

more close to 1/17th. Sure mate if you can react in that amount of time (recive information, anylyze, decide what action to take and transfer it onto keyboard) then you must veery 'special'. I wonder in which department Brad keeps such a special people???

It's an Antec 500w I believe.

I'm strictly talking about first person shooters here. WOW is not a FPS.

Imagine this scenario. You have a fairly small target moving across the screen, it takes 1 second for it to cross it. If every frame shows you where the target was 8ms ago, you have a very much higher probability of clicking on it than if you see where the target was 33ms ago.

If I had any talent in coding, I'd make small game to test it. Just have a 4x4pixel dot moving over the screen in 1 second, the aim of the game would be to click as fast and accurately on the dot as possible. 9 runs should be done, random order on the FPS but 3 times on each framerate (30, 60 and 120FPS, framerate not revealed to the player). Then just show the average distance the clicks was from the dot for every framerate. I'm confident that the difference would be quite apparent.

(I figured out a better way to do this test, but as I don't think anyone is really going to take a crack at doing it, I won't bother with changing this.. )

Electrical signals travel at the speed of light, there's no way you can cut a cable and have anywhere near a 1/100th of a second gain.

I'm pretty sure that if you use the 9.12 hotfix version drivers this is a nonissue. The drivers are somewhat awful atm. 10.1 9.11 F-.

the i7 with an ati 260 seems to run real nice for me.  Demigod in full tilt.  sins though will slow down on large maps about mid to late game, but that has been the case for some time with sins, regardless of the rig

In 1/16th of a second an F1 car will have travelled about 18 feet.  On start/finish in 1995 F1 GP Adelaide [the last one] I worked out the view-angle of the car numbers on the sidepod.....I had 0.2 seconds 'window of opportunity' to recognise the car...locate the number position and read/register the number.  It was my job to let Race Control know when [and the car number of] the last car before the chequered and the first car to receive it [win]. [It was Hill, BTW]. 'Terminal' speed at S/F in Adelaide is about 160mph or about 234 feet per second.

Next weekend it's the World Superbikes at Phillip Island....where the fastest terminal speed [front straight] was recorded at 336kph [MotoGP].  Being a Comms Observer for the FIA/FIM is not a job for a 3 toed sloth ....

I have an interesting situation because my LCD monitor actually refreshes at 120hz regardless of my computer's refresh rate setting (apparently it was designed to reduce the "ghosting" effect some lower-end LCD's have).

I figure that having a 60hz refresh rate set on my computer is actually limiting the framerate.  True, the game itself may actually be running at 75+ FPS, but if the monitor is only refreshing 60 times per second, then your framerate is effectively reduced to 60, right?

With that in mind, of course you would hardly be able to tell the difference between 100 FPS and 30 FPS on a monitor, because the monitor is displaying a solid 60-75hz anyway.  I believe the main contributor to playback smoothness would be V-Sync, to make sure the action moves at a constant speed.

To make my point, all DVD's are recorded at 24 FPS, yet the action looks smooth enough because of motion blur.  Yes, you would be able to tell a difference between 24 and 60 FPS, because action sequences (or anything involving fast movement) would look much cleaner at 60 FPS, due to less motion blur being needed to simulate the same effect.  However, in my opinion FPS rates above 60 don't make as much of a difference when talking about fluid motion, but rather makes movement seem clearer.

Don't get me wrong though.  Games in my opinion require at least 60 FPS to display smoothly.  I don't think it's because of the actual framerate though, but rather the lack of motion blur.

Not quite right.... there's Pal and then there's NTSC ....

Oh, true.  I guess what I meant to say was that film is generally encoded at 24 FPS (though animated films are 30 FPS).

EDIT: Double post.  This site really drives me crazy.

For FPS games fps is the be all and end all.

Try flipping your POV 180° in a fraction of a second and see how 30fps gets you disorientated due to drawing lag.

For FPS games 100fps is about the minimum usable for serious combat.

Anyone who thinks WOW is a pro game needs to get out more...

The 5870 is nice.

But for my nephew's current dream machine I opted for the 5970.

Nearly as good as 2 5870's, but in a single slot with less cost than two 5870's. And he has the option of adding another.

Here are the specs of his 'wish machine':

Thermaltake Spedo VI9000
Intel Core i7-920
Kingston HyperX 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
MSI X58 Pro-E
Thermaltake Toughpower W0133RU 1200W
Diamond Radeon HD5970 2GB PCI-Express Video Card
Intel X25-M 160GB (SSD)
Seagate 500GB Serial ATA/300 16MB Buffer Retail Hard Drive Kit - ST3500641AS-RK
Microsoft Sidewinder X8 Gaming Mouse with BlueTrach Technology
Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
Samsung 2243SWX 21.5" 1080p Widescreen LCD Monitor
Plextor Internal 6X Blu-Ray Combo Super Multi Drive

Win7 Pro x64 as the OS

I haven't spec'd out a system in several years, but this combination seems (to me) to be about the best for a ~$3,000 system that is for gaming. Any suggestions are welcome.