School Of Hard Knocks

The first thing I needed to do to get my M2N-E to support the new chip was to upgrade the BIOS, this was a FIASCO mainly due to AsusTeK support not being properly trained (Don't get me wrong, the Level 2 and 3 guys are awesome, but the level 1 guys are just.. not)  I talked to them about upgrading my BIOS and getting a flash utility, but the L1 tech was unable to assist, I got on with a L2 (By chance) and he was very informative, and we ended up talking for a long while. In the end I basically had to throw the new BIOS on a thumb drive, tell the BIOS to upgrade from the thumb drive and that's it! After I upgraded the BIOS, and the system doesn't boot because (I believe) it loads the old configuration data and the new BIOS tries to read the data in resulting in some kind of corruption. After a bit of googling I realize the only chance I have is to take out the battery from the motherboard and see if it'll boot. Sure enough it does (WHEW!) and then I put in the RAM (Which...

This is part of a longer thread in a quest to get some more FPS out of ARMA2. I played ARMA 2 demo (http://www.arma2.com/arma-2-demo_en.html) on my old system (AMD 6400 + 2GB of ram + Nvidia 8800GTS + 3 Drives in RAID 0) but it felt a little big sluggish, the guys at Bohemia suggest a "fast" dual core for the recommended settings (http://www.arma2.com/support/support-2_en.html), I figured I should be fine, to be honest the results weren't that bad, but I felt that the mouse just felt a bit sluggish. I upgraded to an AMD Phenom 9950 (Black Edition) and 8GB of ram, but to take advantage of the RAM, I needed to upgrade to Windows Vista (After my bout with Windows 7, I was somewhat impressed) Fast forward to the future, only 6GB of RAM works, and ARMA 2 is running at a 200% fillrate at about 25 FPS. Not bad... I think (for me) the RAID 0 helps out HUGE with stuttering (There isn't really much of it, one day, I'll get 4 matched drives and then the fun really starts) Mo...