The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Wow, three times as many deaths from Werner von Braun and company, than from bombs. I need to follow those links.

What do you think of that Iron Curtain that we helped install over in Israel regarding those little Iranian rockets? The rocket fatalities have been minimal. Have you heard much about it?

 

You're kidding.

And by the way, I recall that it is Iron Dome, not Iron Curtain.

Hmmm - I better google it.

Well, I stand corrected. DDP is correct. The US pledged about a half billion in monetary support for the program, but it was built in Israel.

Way to go Adam Sandler!


IRON DOME ANTI-ROCKET SYSTEM, BUILT BY RAFAEL OF ISRAEL

The article, from the week magazine, mentioned that the US pledged about a half billion in monetary support for the program, part-funding it.

Apparently each rocket costs about $95,000, and they don't shoot down the ones that are going to hit open ground.

Here's some more information about the use of these rockets.

Let's run some numbers. That's about 10 rockets = $1 million. If they shot down 87% of 1000 rockets, they used about 870 rockets to do that, divided by 10, equals 87 million dollars in rockets used so far.

That's not bad......

...... ddp spends more than that each winter just on his heating bill.


ARDENNES ASSAULT - MORE NEWS

Remember that guy who posted on the Ardennes Assault forum about his frustration, at standard hardness, at not being able to beat the Marche mission?

"This is revolting - I am still seething with anger. I can not ****ing play this way!" ​

Well, that guy really got me rattled. If there is anything that would bore me to tears, it would be to have to repeat the entire campaign 5 times just to get through one particularly tough mission.


I am used to being able to save, and even if the game doesn't build in saves, like on Arma 3 where they might give you one save if you are lucky, I have found a workaround save system that lets me play single player on very difficult maps that are meant for coop 4 players.


So I decided to test a possible SAVE system for Ardennes Assault.


WHERE I AM IN THE GAME
I am past the Marche "hold two command points" mission that drove him nuts, and very carefully starting the new mission, using the ideas from that terrific Super Moderator. So - I hereby give props to all "lowly moderators." (I forgot who said that - I think it was the Oregon guy.)


But still, what if I screw up and totally blow the mission? The game cautioned me that my mistakes could affect the game - I could even lose a company. So I today tested a Save system. The mission is the city of Stoumont.

Here, per the screenshot below, is where I saved. I am just starting out to take a building from the German command, who have spread themselves too thin, and are low on their fuel reserves.


Look at the below picture. I just for the first time, right now, noticed the gauge at the top of the picture titled ENEMY FUEL RESERVES. I never noticed that before this post.

That makes me think, now, that to accomplish the mission I am going to have to go around and capture and hold all the fuel reserve points, and drive the Nazi fuel reserves to zero.

Almost ready - there's my second AT cannon (click to see the picture full size, then click it again for normal size!)



I was a little nervous about this save, since it seems better to spread the men out - but I actually had saved before this mission in case an artillery burst takes out all my men right here.

So I hit save and quit, then I found the Ardennes Assault folder somewhere in Steam. It had 33 subfolders, but most were empty. The entire folder is only about 12 KB in size.

I saved the entire Ardennes Assault steam folder (not the entire game - just the savegame section - total size is only 12 KB) in my own dated Saved Games folder.


Then I restarted the game, and got the second AT cannon, plus an ambulance, then I started marching out. But I didn't realize that I was so close to the building I am supposed to capture. My plan had been to put a well-equipped squad in the ambulance, and run around and capture as many points as I could, before advancing on the building. That will increase my munitions rate, for example, and allow me to put fixed 50 caliber machine guns into the fighting positions around the building after I capture it, because the whole main focus on the mission is to build a defense to resist the counter-attack. (Now that is my kind of mission. If there is anybody I know who can build a defense, it is the guy in the mirror.)


So I played the game for about 10 minutes, and did a save and quit right here.


I set up a hasty defense, but I will do much better than this if my Save system works



Now, at this point in time, I want to test my save. I want to see if it will roll me back to the very first image. If so, this second time, instead of starting right out and attacking the building, I'll get the ambulance, and run around the map in it. If I encounter huge resistance at capture points, I'll skip them for now, but at least I'll capture the empty ones if there are any.

So I used my shortcut to take me to the steam savegame folder, where I deleted the small Ardennes Assault folder. I replaced it with the one I had saved, right after the save and quit from the top picture. Then I restarted Ardennes Assault.

Did the save work? Where am I now?


Hooray, I'm back where I started ten minutes ago - the SAVE system works - go kick some butt with no worries!!



Yes, the Save system worked. Hooray! It's time to kick some Nazi butt without worrying so much about screwing up - and I won't have to restart the campaign and play that stupid Marche mission again.

I am back where I want to be - the SAVE system works.

Now I can play the game a little more aggressively, and not get all upset when I get massacred.

Rich

 

Yeah, but you're talking Canadian dollars - isn't the exchange rate something like each Canadian dollar is worth a million US dollars?




I LOVE MY SAVE SYSTEM!!

Last night I almost pulled an all-nighter again, on a nightmare mission called Stoumont. The last few missions have been against 1-star Nazi companies.

This one was against a 3-star company.

Man did I get massacred!!! I went out there trying to find 4 command trucks and blow them up to win the mission, and upon finding one, I then experienced a horrific hour of my base being under total attack from all sides as I tried to defend it - HAVING NOT PREPARED A BASE DEFENSE!!

WTF!!!

So I used my beautiful save to roll back to before I started the mission, then I painstakingly took 10-15 minutes to build a pretty solid defense, with tank traps everywhere except for one small opening, 4 AT cannons, 4 new fighting positions each with fixed 50 caliber machine gun - all of that took huge gobs of time - probably more like a half hour now that I think about it. Maybe even an hour!


Then I got the brilliant idea to save and quit there, then of course to SAVE the Ardennes Assault folder in a special folder of my own called Bastogne Outskirts after base defense setup, so that I could start from there in the future and skip all the defense buildup.


That was exactly how I used to do it in the Priprat River skirmish one year ago, when the game allowed you to create save points and give them meaningful names, or non-meaningful names if you like, such as "DDP does not live in a cold place."

Anyway, guess what - I had to return to that save point again and again, as I got my butt totally kicked. Finally I started thinking - "what have I not tried doing?"

I had put the game away with the thought - "Next week when I'm fresh."

One thing I WAS doing, was that I was giving my guys bazookas, and also the BAR, at 60 munitions points each. However, there was an LMG (light machine gun) rack, at a cost of 70 munitions points, that I had been ignoring. It said the weapon could be fired on the run, unlike the 50 caliber which requires the shooter to set up a fixed position with an arc of fire, like the Anti Tank cannons.

So I went back to the computer, turned it on, started up the game, and waited and waited for the slow munitions to build up, at the rate of 11 per minute, to give two squads the 70 point LMG. I wanted to see if we would be more effective in taking that first truck, since we were totally getting killed by some serious squads of Nazis who knew how to shoot (part of being a 3-star nazi company was that these were not your standard Nazis, these were Jager-troopens, or something like that. )

With the LMGs, we did okay - not great - just okay.

Later, in similarly equipping two other squads with the LMG, we went after a nazi howitzer that was bombarding our base, and I saw a button that caused my lmg squads to go prone.

YES PRONE - YOU HEARD ME CORRECTLY

SHADES OF ARMA3. I WILL BE GODDAMNED!!!

All of a sudden, after going prone, they became proficient marksmen and they immediately killed those howitzer troops, non of that crap about shoot shoot shoot and nobody dies.

Then I tried to get them to stand up and commandeer the weapon, but they wouldn't move. What? Of course, I had to hit the button again, to release them from prone, and then they stood up. That's fine, I can deal with that.


You might think to question me "How the hell do you think you're going to beat the game, Rich, if you don't even know what the special squad capabilities are that you have available to you?"

Good question!!!

The only one rude enough to ask me that, implying that I am an idiot, would be ddp. To you I would have to say "What happened to the Super moderator concept? Don't pay attention to Kevin! If you hadn't politely kept your mouth shut for all this time, AND JUST BEEN YOUR NORMAL SELF, you could have saved me a GIANT AMOUNT OF HASSLE!!"


So as you can see I made a lot of mistakes in that mission, and I think I will replay it. I now know how to get my LMG squads to go prone, which I think is SUPER GREAT!!. That is the first thing we do in Arma3 as soon as the bullets start whizzing past our heads.


I also came across some very interesting tanks - yes I built some heavy armor - in particular one howitzer tank. It's the same 75mm howitzer that we get to push around manually, but it's mobile, and it looks like a tank with a very short firing barrel. It can tilt the barrel up and lob hard, or lob soft. In fact, it can soft lob a round out, and kill an infantry squad only 20 feet away. On the push-howitzer, we have to be 75 feet away to even use the thing, or the game says "TOO CLOSE."

So I could see possibly using two of those instead of mortars, in my base defense on each side of the circle. They rotate around by themselves as needed - they don't have to be micro-managed - they don't have a limited kill arc - and they lob shells at long distances, as well as at very short distances as I mentioned, for infantry that gets past the machine guns. With the long range, that might make it possible for them to take out the little push howitzers that the nazis like to use to shell my base, (before they build the massive artillery that rains down giant shells on the base) assuming the mobile howitzers don't need to have a friendly hanging around close to those distant nazis to lift the "fog of war" which COH is so fond of. (All the enemies are invisible unless you are within about 50 feet of them.)

Arma3 doesn't have "fog of war." If you have a range finder, you can look way out for up to about 3000 meters, almost two miles, like in American Sniper. So I mostly consider "fog of war" a COH bullsh*t concept.

On the other hand, these battles are much more massive than anything in Arma3, so if in general there is a lot of low-lying smoke and haze, I guess I could kind of see their point. ​

But, anyway, in this DLC, regarding that "fog of war" concept, the nazis shooting the howitzer light up by glowing red, as if you were looking at them with an infra-red scope. I think what that means is that, technically you aren't supposed to be able to see them, but to keep everybody from pulling their hair out, the devs decided to provide a half-way workaround to reduce the frustration of the "fog of war" bull-sh*t. But I don't know. The trucks, once you discover them, light up red, but you can't use the pinpoint artillery button on them, until somebody gets close. So I might still have to run out and kill the push howitzer guys - but that's okay - I bring them back and then our base defense really starts to firm up.

This new thing of lighting up red, wasn't like that a year ago on Priprat River. I never knew where the damn mortar rounds were coming from - except by trying to observe the trajectory of how they were lobbing in on us. I had those little squad cars running all around trying to locate and kill them. I was ordering squad cars, 3 every 2 minutes, parking them on the second victory hill for when I need to get them in a hurry, whenever the mortars started dropping on us. Without that expendable squad car trick, I never could have beaten that skirmish.​

So anyway, yes, I will have to get more familiar with those mobile howitzer tanks, and see how they fit into the scheme of things, which is to kill nazis and win missions and beat this bad-ass DLC.

Another thing I would like to try next time, is to go up on top, and take out those 3 trucks first, then that would leave only the far bottom truck to eventually attack, much closer to the base than that last upper truck.

I would take infantry only, one portable heavy machine gun, two squads with LMGs and two with bazookas, the two mortars in the back, and 2 or 3 extra squads to fill in as guys get killed, especially if I bring along two AT guns. This time I would have the LMG squads go prone, rapidly kill any infantry resistance, and hopefully the pin-point artillery button would un-gray to give me some help, and hopefully the Nazis would not yet have built the monster tank.

The AT can kill the monster tank, but it takes a while - and a well-placed shot from the monster of its very powerful cannon, will destroy the AT crew, even behind its solid shield. ​

BUT AS I SAY - AFTER ABOUT TWO HOURS OF HELL - I ACTUALLY DID BEAT THE MISSION!!
I persisted, and eventually - by the skin of my teeth - I beat the mission - this of course is on standard - not hard.

When I say skin of my teeth - my base was totally destroyed - the symbol on the mini-map was a large skull, and I was down to my last engineer squad, and I only got them because a button lit up giving me two engineer squads to rebuild the base. That button lit up twice toward the end, and I went through those four squads like cannon fodder.

I was down to killing the last, 4th enemy truck, and I was calling in the pairs of Stuart light tanks, when that button lit up, and then in desperation, I finally rounded up my entire base and clicked the mini-map to bring them all up to that far corner, and they all got killed off - I got the truck down to about 35% life, even as the engineers were on the non-firing side trying to repair it, and the monster tank was also on the non-firing side, and I think I was slowly destroying it faster than they were restoring it. But then thinking the monster had gone away, I stupidly moved my last Stuart over a bit to try to kill the engineers, then the monster immediately destroyed it.


So many times, just like that, I thought - "Well, THAT mistake just cost me the game." A prior mistake had been to not notice the AT cannon that was killing my Stuarts. Mistake after mistake.


The command guy on the radio was screaming

"This is it men, we are either going to finish this, or we are going to die out in a blaze of glory."


But I was kind of in a daze - I couldn't believe I STILL had any offensive capability at all - I was just waiting for the big DEFEAT title to show up on the top of the screen.

(But in the back of my mind, I was still heartened, preparing for "next time" because I had learned a lot - never before had I gotten past just killing one truck. Not to mention the huge ace up my sleeve - "Go to my save folder, copy and paste, then simply go back in time and restart the game at the point after having built up my base defense." I like it!) ​

Anyway, so the button says, "two support squads to help you rebuild the base."

But instead of sitting around trying to rebuild a destroyed base, (unable to give them even a bazooka or a BAR) I marched them off to the upper right corner of the map, where that final 4th truck was, defended by a giant tank that had been killing all my AT cannons and the 5 tanks I had sent against it before.

But this last time, I had a suspicion that I had killed him just before my men were wiped out.

As I said, I had left one AT cannon near that truck, and I had a good idea that I had already destroyed that giant-ass tank, mostly due to a pin-point artillery button that kicks in once in a while. I was trying to get the button to kill the 4th truck, but the artillery shells went for the tank, and when he backed up, I think the shells chased him, as unlikely as that would be in real life for indirect 105mm fire.

I didn't want the shells to chase him - I wanted the shells to rain down on the goddamn truck, then I would win. But I think that's what happened, that the burst chased the tank below my field of view, and that possibly the tank was dead, or maybe off somewhere getting repaired.

So here I am, marching these two weak-ass support squads to try to finish this mission. If my AT cannon were still there, I just wanted to get it active, if the nazis hadn't hauled it away, and give it one last try, although I figured that the german engineers had by now restored the truck to full health, which they had done.

It was a long stressful hike to that last truck. Actually not that stressful, because I had sort of already given up. Only one of my 4-man squads made it.

The guys took charge of the AT cannon, then they came under some rifle fire from the nearby engineers. But for a few days, I had noticed another strange button that I didn't quite understand, which said something to the effect, " if you press this, your engineers do a rapid fire of their rifles for 25 seconds, which will eventually pin the guys they are shooting at. (Otherwise, let me tell you, those engineers are for- sh*t shooters - this company did not have flamethrowers for their engineers which is completely the best anti-infantry tool.)

I had never before hit that strange button which I didn't quite understand, but this time I did hit it.

So I hit the button, and maybe that helped - all I know is that the one or two enemy engineers died pretty quick. And then thankfully the pin-point artillery button lit up again, and I dumped all of those 5-6 shells down on the sh*t stubborn truck, and reduced half its life. Then, boom, boom, boom, I kept hitting it with cannon fire - about 8-10 blows- the health gauge dropping slowly with each shell, waiting for some big-ass tank to come kill me, or for some Jager-troopens infantry squad to put me out of my misery.


A miracle happened. Nobody showed up. The goddamn thing was destroyed!

I ended up with 26 company experience points,

and 1 health point.​

Hahahahahahahahaha

Rich

 

Dell UltraSharp U2713 27" 2560 x 1440 IPS display ordered used for $350. 4690K and Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H already here and installed.

 

Rich - 'fog of war' is an RTS concept - it's a general rule that's to illustrate you not being able to see stuff that your units can't see. It's not specific to CoH, but it's not in Arma, because Arma isn't an RTS, it's an FPS title.

Welcome to extra-high resolution gaming Jeff, I think you'll enjoy it

For the benefit of this thread, my monitor's now on its way to me
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/philips_bdm4065uc.htm
Fingers crossed I can deal with its size properly, getting a bit big to handle now!

 

As far as space and weight, a 40" screen can be a bear. As far as size vs usability though, I think you'll be surprised how easy it is to lean back and bask in it. Granted the 4K resolution and increased ppi adds another dimension, but I never found 40" overwhelming, even coming directly from a 24". Anything larger becomes unwieldy, but 40" is just enough to fill your entire field of view at desktop distances. No neck craning needed.

 

Weight no - the BDM4065UC weighs very little more than my UP3214Q, and both weigh barely half as much as the 3008WFP. I have a little room to push it further back on my desk to take in the extra size, and I'm also looking at getting a bigger desk to better make use of my equipment - not just to have room for a bigger display, but also to stow my PCs under the far side of the desk rather than out in the open where they're more prone to dust and anything else.

 

My current setup isn't too bad at all.

-One desk centered on the longest wall of my room for my main gaming PC and 5.1 system to be centered around.
-Smaller desk on the perpendicular wall to the right with headphones and the 2407WFP/Core 2 Quad box.
-Bed on the perpendicular wall to the left. My left surround speaker is actually shifted to the right to make room for the bed, so receiver's YPAO mic was essential in getting the settings worked out.
-Closet on the parallel wall to the rear, with surround speaker on each side.
-Stereo cabinet with all my consoles and my receiver in the front left corner next to my front left speaker, at the foot of my bed.
-Bookshelf full of games on right wall next to Core 2 Quad PC.

I have been sorting my worldly belongings forever so I could fit everything cleanly into my closet. I can now devote my entire room to being a mancave and gaming room. The way I've been able to tuck everything in so cleanly with two fullsize desktop PCs is a small wonder. It also allows me to have a full size floorstanding 5.1 setup with reasonable speaker placement. Though the speakers are too close to objects on either side, limiting their sound capability IMO. They definitely lose some bass response from it. They aren't tucked into tiny places though. There is some room to breathe Nothing is particularly cramped even in an 11' by 13' room with a twin bed. It's becoming quite the little home theater and gaming center.

Size + resolution = immersion. I want to play Crysis in real high resolution. It's also slightly less demanding than 2560 x 1600. I'm already going to be tasking this card quite a bit. When Witcher 3 comes out it maybe time for a second card My only concern is resolution support in older 3D games. The aspect ratio is the same as 1080p so that shouldn't be a bother but getting them to use the resolution might be an issue.

The first games I try are going to be Warhammer 40k Dawn of War 2 and Men of War Assault Squad 2. 3D RTS games always benefit the most from resolution increases IMO.

 

You have to remember, I'm using the same card, not overclocked, at 3840x2160 - it does fairly well under the circumstances. Sure, it's not going to max out Crysis 3, but most high-end titles are very playable with a small number of settings turned down. Apart from the 3.5GB VRAM, the GTX970 is a very capable card. That said, I am eagerly awaiting the R9 300 series which is supposedly quite a step up from the 200, somehow. If I could have afforded it, I would already bought a Titan X, because in actuality, their value for money is nowhere near as bad as Titans used to be.

 

The 970 should be well suited for my needs at 1440p. As you well know, I'm not a big fan of how AA is implemented in a lot of games and prefer straight native res. This new monitor should make that a much easier thing to do with its impressive .23mm pixel pitch. That leaves me a LOT of breathing room as opposed to published benchmarks which use torture settings usually. The games which DO implement AA well have good enough optimization for me to at least get 4x, which is fine by me. Skyrim, Far Cry 3 and 4, Wolfenstein, all RTS games inclusive. I'm not using 4k and am light-handed with AA so the 3.5 + .5 memory should work fine. 2GB would honestly be fine for the majority at 1080p. I am aware how large an increase in pixel count 1440p is though. It's going to be interesting to see what my limits are, newly reborn PC and all. Modern Intel quad with a very nice OC. Overkill fast high-capacity RAM, one of the best SSDs you can get and one of the best video cards currently available. Not to mention the best possible cooling without building your own. I suspect something will spark the upgrade bug again though. I have yet to see how Far Cry 4 really runs for extended gameplay. I played most of that on the 760, which put up a good fight but failed to maintain the smooth framerates of the 970. It gets very demanding in later segments.

This motherboard is spectacularly well featured by the way. It's a monster. Killer BigFoot and Intel Pro dual LAN ports, The best Realtek sound chip yet available isolated from rest of the board to reduce EMF. Onboard power, reset, and clear CMOS buttons. LED display showing the current status of the system in alphanumeric code. It's the best equipped board I've ever owned. Being a replacement for one with bent pins means it wasnt a bad one sent back, it's brand new. Works perfectly *knock on wood*

The monitor is also brand new open box. Never even plugged in.

 

MSAA is fine by me but obviously tanks performance pretty hard. Morphological/Temporal anti-aliasing I'm not a huge fan of but I think I'd still rather have them than nothing, even at high DPI settings.

At 2560x1440, with the components you have, I think you're pretty much all set

 

So April 14th is the day. GTA V. Will a store bought version be steam powered? Or will it be Games for windows? Given it's 65Gb hard drive space, I'd really prefer not have to download it. It would take me ~48hrs uninterrupted to download that :S
I see that Steam is offering preorders. So is it exclusively steam this time around?

 

Given that Games for Windows Live is being removed from most titles, I don't imagine it will be using it, at least I hope not!
As for a PC CD version there should probably be one, but most modern titles still need fairly big online patches even if they come on disc...

 

Oh good. My experience with GFW is very poor indeed!

 

As is everybody's, it was a terrible product.

 

GFWL was a poison and its death, though the end of some good multiplayer games, was a step forward for the industry.

Some good news. Dell UltraSharp U2713HM 2560 x 1440 27" IPS monitor arrived in a cocoon of cardboard, bubble wrap, and even more cardboard, lol. A COCOON I tell you! The sender obviously understood this was a fragile and expensive item and wanted to ensure it got here safely. Perfect, even with the new electronics smell intact. All Dell materials included with original shipping box. Manufacture date is July 2014 which places it FAR past the dates which exhibited bad issues like abnormal or colored backlight bleed, and a picky scaler.

Screen is flawless with even backlighting, color, and contrast across its entirety. A real beauty! Very sharp image. Exceedingly sharp even. The DPI scaling needs to be set at 125% minimum, but 150% gets the same scaling as a 1080p HDTV/monitor give or take. I settled on 125% as I do want some extra desktop real-estate. I hooked it up through DisplayPort BTW. This is not a model which can do 1440p through HDMI and I don't currently have a Dual Link DVI cable, so DisplayPort was easy and foolproof.

Works perfectly with all of my AV equipment so far tested. Jury is out on the N64. It'll display the EverDrive 64's menu when tested with the old HDTV, but not games. Monitor should prove an interesting test. Perhaps it was displaying 240p which the TV could not handle.

PC games performance is good. The performance hit is about 50% give or take. On anything older than a year or so, the GTX970 absolutely flies. With new games it sits around my ideal 60FPS average or even higher in a large number of titles. The GTX970 gets the job done with flying colors. It is undoubtedly a superior experience. Image quality is outstanding. Colors are vibrant and very natural, black levels are good, and response times are negligible. Even Crysis maxed with my custom settings and texture mods still averages 65+ FPS. Now THAT's impressive graphics power.

This monitor is an excellent example of its product line. I am already falling in love and plan to keep it into antiquity. The image quality is fantastic, the OSD is easy to navigate and very well designed unlike most, and it's everything I ever wanted in a high resolution display. Plus, it's a Dell UltraSharp, which is what caught my interest right from the beginning. It's a perfect companion to the old faithful 2407WFP in my lineup.

 

125% scaling on a 110dpi display? and here I am using 140dpi native
Can't be dealing with DPI scaling, not in windows at least. Supposedly Macs handle it better.

The Philips BDM4065UC was very disappointing, and I'm going to try and return it - back on the UP3214Q for now. 60Hz SST and 40" it may be, but having used Dell Ultrasharps for so many years it's easy to forget 'how the other half live'. The VA panel viewing angles weren't great, combined with weak backlight uniformity in corners made the screen very difficult to see in the corners without having the brightness too high, having the controls mounted on the back of the monitor was annoying, especially with 40" of panel to reach behind, the power LED has to be covered up as it points directly at you without any logo diffuser like the Dells use. A 0-way adjustable (i.e. fixed) stand didn't bug me too much but it would plenty of others. These are all minor points though compared to the panel itself - colour vibrancy was very washed out compared to all the Dells I've owned, rather like turning the colour saturation down halfway, the ghosting was horrendous, reminiscent of the 25ms panels from early LCD days if not worse, and colour perimeter distortion was pretty bad too. That plus plasma-style image persistence leaving marks behind on the screen from just 30 minutes of having a desktop window open, all problems my Dell doesn't have. As much of a nuisance as MST is, the old monitor is superior in every way, so will stay until I can find a worthy SST successor, which the Philips is not.