PC Specs: 
4 GB RAM 
2-core Athlon 4850e 
ATI Radeon 4670 
400 Watt Power Supply
 
Today I bought Dead Space via Direct2Drive for a couple bucks & started the game in 1440x900, specs high - no AA. I knew I was going for trouble but was confident nothing bad would happen. System heats up alright, but we live in modern times! Mainboards and videocards monitor temperatures & would shut down before something starts cooking or melting, right?
 
Maybe 15 minutes into the game, killed my first splicer-whats-his-name and was briefed by Capt'n Whatshisname & Sidekick chick via com, I turned around - yeah,yeah, the game character did. I saw them still standing in the hall we just entered and enjoyed the lightning effects when *clack* the system crashed into a hardlock. 
 
Hadn't that happening to me for quite some time at home. I started to smirk and actually laugh. Finally some hardware testing at home instead of work. Sunday evening (GMT+1 Timezone) - that's just awesome.
 
Now I am in the process of checking what's damaged and what's still working. I type this on the same system with a different CPU, no SATA or IDE harddrive (USB-Linux-Stick) working my way through everything: one component at a time. A different game then I wanted to play today but still kinda fun.
 
Sorry for stealing your time - whoever reads this.

endure first minute ... and you're in for a treat. wicked Duder. 

I just wrote a comment on DirectX 11 powered Dirt 2 video showing off the new DirectX features. I thought I blog this too.
 
DirectX11 is not a major leap forward like DirectX 10 (or previously 6, 7 and 9) have been, as all of you in this thread already know. 11 is a nice upgrade for 10 on the rendering side. Sound, etc ... no major changes as far as I see.
 
And here a summary of questions people might have, who are not familiar with DirectX (old Dudes, look away;)

• You need a DirectX 11 videocard for your PC to run DirectX 11 effects on the hardware. DirectX 10 or 10.1 chips won't do the trick.
  
• DirectX 11 is not supported by your XBOX360 - neither by a PS3 or Wii or your TV (seriously, don't laugh. I get those questions)
• You need Windows Vista or Windows 7 (not backwards compatible with XP or older OS versions!)
  
• You don't really need it. There are some nice cinematic effects as you see, but everybody can live without them and many new games will in fact be without them. The multi-threading features are supported already - yet not that many games are really using multi-threading to it's full advantage (because it's 1. hard as hell to programm and 2. limited by videogame design issues in general).
  
• Hardware Tessellation is something you have since the first AGP-graphics cards. Messiah was to my knowledge the first game that shipped offering this feature to gamers. (I could be wrong).

I am not competitive. Yep! I'm that lame. You won't find my stats on any of the online-rankings, partially of course, because I suck at many games, partially b/c I don't care. So, just to prove that I am not totally lame, I have this recent one and only achievement, I want to document and share. 
 
                               at the moment 2nd place (will not persue 1st place, so it's only going down from here on)  http://twitter.com/translate/leaders/de

Sorry for this 'personal' blog ego-surfing entry. Usually the word " I " and the notion of "me me me" is something I avoid. Nothing more annoying than to read personal bullshit of people you don't know. True.
 
Do you care about your Achievements? And how much do you care? Does it bother you that somebody is in the top 10 and you are not?

    
                                The song is 'M.A.D' by Hadouken - no promo by me (I never heard of them before). It's just for those who wanna know.