Not too sure, but when i bought something in the states for £200, i ended up having to pay about £40 customs charges.

just fyi, last report I heard about the 64bit version of xp (which at least was freely available as a beta) is that it was really stable.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bi ... grade.mspx

to be honest i think theres been a few changes since the bad old days.

mmm..interesting..i'm 64 bit, i might give that a go soon.

Ive never heard of foxconn either. Statis Im surprised atyour last sentence. It is more about the manufacturer than the chipset. At least, in my exerpiance.

So youre saying that every say, intel 865 chip set board is just as stable as the all the other ones?

I can't comment on intel chipsets, since I've never built an intel board. From my experience with AMD boards, it's pretty much all about the chipset. VIA and Nvidia pretty much own that. I've built machines using boards from a large variety of major manufacturers and it's always been the chipset that made the difference.

Now, I may be wrong or got lucky. I always used major, known manufacturers. Maybe some little rinky-dink shit company can take a badass chipset and seriously fuck it up, but I have no experience with that.

Or maybe I'm just so good I scare myself.

As a counterpoint, my first computer I built used an IWill board with a VIA chipset. This was back when a 450mhz machine was pretty goddamn good. Board sucked ass. I think it was the chipset more than the mobo manufacturer's fault, but who knows. I'll never buy IWill again, though. Never would've bought VIA again if I hadn't been so impressed by the KT-333 and KT-400 performance.

Right, well I bought the motherboard, the next step is the processor, but again, I have to save for that.

So, which of the graphics cards would you recommend, or could you recommend a better GEFORCE one, for about the same price? Say set £100 as the limit.

Er, £100 is approx $200 dollars right now.

just done a quick check up, seems rates have dropped a little


United Kingdom Pounds 100.00 GBP= 189.240 USD

Almost enough for GeF6600. But based on the info i have, its noisy.

Noise doesn't bother me right now, reigning supreme does

Just gotta get some cash. lots and losta cash.

I hate noise. Its one of those hidden factors that you never know by what it says on the tin.

When i was wordprocessing, my last laptop was like Boeing 747 on takeoff.

My new Dell on the other hand = no...fan...noise...

Well, A while back, I tried to liquid cool my system to remove noise and increase coolness, but There were a lot more peices required than I knew about. So I've got a pump, cooling block, that sticky white shit you use to transfer heat from proc to block, tubes and alsort running about the place with nout to do. Maybe I'll sell it on eBay or something, cus it won't fit my new Mobo when it arrives.

Anyways, is liquid cooling available for Graphics Cards?

sure, just pour in a pint of water throught the rear fan outlet.

Oh yes. Why ever didn't i think of that.

lol. Yea, you can get liquid cooled kits for gfx cards. Fry's (where I buy my shit) actually had a gfx card that sold pre-built for water cooling. I think it was a geforce fx 6800...water block and everything you need already on the card. Of course, it cost like $600, but still. :p

Anyway, I'm not an expert on video cards any more. The shit changes too much, and I'm too busy at work to really do all the reading I used to. I did recently rebuild some of my systems....replaced my 1GB of cas 2 pc2700 RAMon my main box with 1GB of cas2 pc3200, then swapped components between my other pcs to build Shiny a better gaming box. It's not top of the line, but it's much better.

before:
1.2ghz athlon
512MB cas2 pc133 RAM
geforce 2 GTS

now:
athlon xp 2200+
768MB cas2 pc2700
geforce fx 5200

My box I haven't, of course, noticed much of a difference.

Theres one really good thing about my Dell case and one bad thing.

Good thing = Effectively, theres a clever hole in the front of the machine that sucks in air for the CPU heatsink which gets thrown right out of the back. If it wasnt for the decorative plastic, you could see straight through the system.

Bad thing = Plastic casing. Not ideal and it rattles.

Motherboard, Check. Bitches.

Now please lend me some money so I can buy a processor, and a better power supply.

Are there any compatibilty things I should look out for when buying a power supply?