Unless you’ve been specifically invited into the HALO 3 beta, you will need to have the Crackdown disc in your drive if you’re going to play it. Yes you’ll download it to your hard drive, but you’ll only be able to launch HALO 3 beta via a menu in Crackdown. The HALO 3 beta won’t show up in your “Games > Demos and More” blade on your XBOX 360.

Xbox 360 Fanboy has put up a scan of the invite card you get when you purchase one of the specially-marked boxes of Crackdown that give you access to the upcoming Halo 3 public multiplayer data. It contains the answers to many of the questions that those hoping to get into the beta have been asking themselves:

• The beta will be downloaded. Obviously you need and Xbox Live Gold subscription and a fast internet connection to play at all, but it seems some users were hoping there’d be a disc to save them the download. Looks like the answer is “no”. Expect about a 1Gb download from Xbox Live.
• The Crackdown disc is required. This is probably only true for those who gained access to the beta by buying Crackdown; but you have to access the Halo 3 beta through the game’s menus, and the disc must be in the drive. No word yet on how it will work for those who gained access some other way. When the beta becomes available, this menu option will activate; no code is needed.
• The Halo 3 Beta will expire. The invite doesn’t say how long it will last, or whether this applies to Phase One, Phase Two, or Friends & Family beta participants, but it does cleary say that the beta will end at some point and no longer be accessible, at least for Crackdown owners.

That last one is likely to apply to most beta participants; I’d warrant that Bungie will not want the full game, when released, competing on Xbox Live with the Beta, so it likely will end some time before the final release.

Registration will open February 12 for the 5×5 Proelium Standards Myth vTFL tournament, part of the events scheduled this year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Bungie’s Mac and PC RTS game, Myth: The Fallen Lords.

Thanks to Zandervix at Myth.Bungie.Org for the news.

Members of the PMS and Cavegirls clans came out to challenge the Bungie guys (and friends) in the latest humpday and came away winners, 6 to 5. The Bungie guys complain they were undermanned, but surely they knew that going in? Details at Bungie.net in KfeckingP‘s post.

[Updated and Edited] Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been doing some gaming pc research and decided on purchasing one of the top of the line video cards that will last me a good while. But before I buy it, I’ve found that those cards will not fit on my current motherboard. I’ve got a Dell e510/5150, the heat sink on the cpu is blocking the way. Therefore, I plan on building a new gaming pc out of some parts from my Dell, and a new motherboard. Below are some findings from a little bit of research and discussion with rapture on the best hardware to get into. Nvidia has the top of the line card right now with the 8800gtx, ATI is close on their heels with an upcoming card described below. Nvidia also designs motherboards, and it looks like the Nvidia nforce 680i is one of the top dogs at the moment. If your new to game pc building (as I was a couple weeks ago) Nvidia does the design, but they do not manufacture any of their cards. You will be buying the card from one of the 3rd party manufacturers such as BFG, EVGA, and many others. Some of these companies will overclock the graphics card and tweak some stuff on the motherboards to separate themselves from the competition.

rapture is planning another gaming pc build as well, here’s one of his comments:
“I’ve done some more research on video cards as I’m trying to plan out my next computer purchase.

ATI is soon going to release the ATI R600 which will likely be called something like the Radeon X2900. Reportedly, it will jump ahead of the NVIDIA 8800 cards. Actually, the reports are that it blows them out of the water. This card is due out in Q1 07.

The performance increase sounds amazing. Tests have shown a 20% improvement in graphics while gaming over the NVIDIA 8800. Holy Cow. 20%. One NVIDIA 8800 is faster than two of just about every other card in the world. It even runs faster than two NVIDIA 7900 GTX’s in SLI mode.

Now the ATI R600 is supposed to run 20% faster than the NVIDIA 8800. Holy crap.

These guys got to test the R600: http://level505.com/2006/12/30/the-full-ati-r600-test/1/

They played several games at 1600×1200 will 4-16 times full screen anti-aliasing and 4-16 times anisotropic filtering and they blew away the 8800.

Rumors are that the R600 will take a lot of juice. It could require more than 250W of power. This had led some to believe that we’ll see this card as an EXTERNAL attachment to the computer.

The R600 will cost about $600 bucks.”

We’ll continue to post our findings and eventually, hopefully some pictures of what we end up with.