Now it's my turn...

[VoX]

Right, the time is very nearly here, should have the money for a new PC around Feb but I just want to get an idea for budget/price now to know how long I've got etc and how many jobs I should start doing.



I reckon that in Feb I'll have around £600 give or take, and the price of C2D should have gone down by then so I can upgrade a few other things.

Alas, I have surrendered to ATI as the 4850 looks soo good for the price, and I have been won over by the Sonata III mainly because it comes with a good PSU, although in terms of overclock potential, this is quite limited, but upgradeable in future.

My plans are to get a fair PC first, and then upgrade later with a quad core and some stuff for OCing, and then sell old CPU to my parents (hopefully.)

Ideas?

EDIT: Fuck, forgot the OS, need to do some re-shuffling to fit it in budget.

EDIT 2: Right, included an OS but not sure what to cut back on to get it to fit in budget, ideas?

[Calneon]

Looks good considering you're including a monitor. I would recommend a Samsung F1 HDD if you can get one, they are meant to be the best. The keyboard probably isn't worth the price, there is no need for a wireless one (unless you specifically want that one). Case looks nice, the price of that monitor worries me, but I guess it's gonna do it's job at least.

The only other thing is that I really would recommend Vista at this moment in time. You can get it for only a little bit more and it isn't nearly as bad as most people say. A year ago, i'd say stick with XP yes, but now everything is made for vista, everything is compatable, and the performance difference is next to negligible. Though you might want another 1-2GB of RAM if you do get Vista, but RAM is so cheap anyway.

Other than that it looks good! Only place I can really see you saving cash on would be the keyboard.

[VoX]

I liked the look of the KB and M and they will be moved about allot so will need to be wireless.

I plan to get Vista at a later date, along with another 2GB of RAM as atm, just Vista puts it to over £700.

[ez64]

Everything is good apart from 2gb instead of 4gb they cost virtually the same these days, and as always RAID 0!!!! cost's next to nothing and has a silly amount of performance increase for your pc.

Also try and go for the 1333mhz fsb C2D chips they have a lot more umph for the cash.

[D_K_Head]

I liked the look of the KB and M and they will be moved about allot so will need to be wireless.

I plan to get Vista at a later date, along with another 2GB of RAM as atm, just Vista puts it to over £700.

Don't.

[Calneon]

Don't.

Yeah, what's the point of spending £60 now on XP, and then another £85 on Vista later? Just get Vista now and be done with it.

[VoX]

I am trying to keep the cost to a minimum, when it comes to the actual date of buying, Vista should have gone down in price along with the C2D's so I'll see hat I can afford then.

How much performance increase is in RAID 0 then?

[D_K_Head]

Yeah, what's the point of spending £60 now on XP, and then another £85 on Vista later? Just get Vista now and be done with it.

no... Don't go for vista. It's one huge headache for no visible bonus. Half th games you love on XP require excessive tweaking or just will not play, and if they do some features refuse to work. I am hating vista at the moment. It's totally not worth it dude.

[ez64]

no... Don't go for vista. It's one huge headache for no visible bonus. Half th games you love on XP require excessive tweaking or just will not play, and if they do some features refuse to work. I am hating vista at the moment. It's totally not worth it dude.

Pretty please stfu when you dont have the slightest clue what your talking about kthnx?

cba to be drawn into another vista xp debate, vista with sp1 is a far more powerful and stable o/s than any release of XP ever was and will be.

SP2 for vista is to be released this month as well.


RAID 0 with Vista and 4gb of ram is just lush, Ive got 2 raptors on it atm but still normal sata2 hdd's in RAID 0 will give your the most notcieble performance in O/S response/Game load/Game stuttering(not fps issues)/Game response.

It's as simple as pie to setup and maintain and costs barely anything and vista was optimized for systems with 2gb of ram+ and loves raid 0 on the indexing side of things. Just because it needs 2gb of ram to function as it should doesnt mean it's eating things its just pre loading stuff that you might use and doing defragment's and other optimization and stability tasks in the background.

[Calneon]

Pretty please stfu when you dont have the slightest clue what your talking about kthnx?

cba to be drawn into another vista xp debate, vista with sp1 is a far more powerful and stable o/s than any release of XP ever was and will be.

SP2 for vista is to be released this month as well.

Completely agree. It's a shame that most of the improvements with Vista are under the bonnet, so the average user doesn't even know they're there. DK Head, you clearly don't know what you're talking about, it obviously isn't as bad as you say. Care to name a few games that require excessive tweaking or just will not work? I've never had a problem with Vista that I haven't solved rather easily and i've owned it for over a year.

[D_K_Head]

ok, heres a few.

Battlefield 2 (2142): I've just had horrible luck with this one. Kept crashing out until lurking through forums found me a fix for that. For some reason it keeps turning into a steaming pile of crash every few months, when nothing's altered, so i have to reinstall the game, the patch, and the mods i use alongside it.

ProPow: Wasn't vista compatible until months after the beta release, no fix.

Longest Journy: Refuses to work with vista, acctually BSODed me when i tried to run it, can't play this anymore.

SAMP: Can't use the downgrader anymore due to the original game not being compat, so unable to join in with these servers anymore.

If you are such experts compared to me then, i'll ask you. What's so different about vista that's surposed to be so good. And if it really does outweigh the drawbacks. UAC, for instance, is an incredibally annoying thing that was listed as one of the benifits elsewhere. And please don't just link me to a XP vs Vista argument site.

(and if you know any fixes for the last two, i'll be happy to hear them.)

EDIT: Oh, and the above post was my personal experience with vista, ie a fight against everything in it.

[VoX]

Also, a new OS makes a new comp feel a bit newer.

I'm fine with a bit of tweaking to get games working and I don't plan to have what is Vista's (apparent) nightmare, a soundcard.

[Calneon]

I have a Creative X-Fi soundcard and it works fine with Vista.

DK, I understand your argument, the BF2 one sounds more like a GFX card error than the OS, BF2 works fine for me. If the others are incompatible, then it's a fair point. However, for 99% of games there are patches that make games work on Vista, maybe you're just unlucky.

In terms of why Vista is better, there are a few things I could tell you, though I'm sure people who know a bit more could tell you even more. For one, security is much better, as you said UAC gets annoying but you can turn it off and be done with it. Firewall, Windows Defender etc are better in Vista. There are small things, for example, if Vista is downloading an upadate in the background, on XP it would have stolen all your bandwidth leading to lag in games, however in Vista it only takes what it can when you aren't using it. Other things like indexing which keeps and index of your files for easy searching, makes searching A LOT faster and it only uses resources when you aren't using them.

DX10 also, though I don't use it on many games because they don't use it properly, many games are now starting to use it (for example Far Cry 2 performs BETTER with DX10 than DX9 on my PC). Obviously Vista looks much nicer than XP (And I have a custom skin to make it look even better). Driver support is much better, where in XP I had to have the disk to install my printer drivers, Vista already has them or can download them, so I was up and running in minutes. Same with my 360 controller, I actually downloaded the drivers just to realise I didn't need them.

That's all I can think of right now xD.

[D_K_Head]

very unlucky. and you've listed most of the things i hate about vista :P

maybe its just because i prefer older games...

[VoX]

Obviously Vista looks much nicer than XP (And I have a custom skin to make it look even better).

Pics?

The monitor will need to be changed (I think) as it's inputs are DVI-D and D-SUB, but by looking at pics, D-SUB is just VGA, so I can just use a converter, right? But as I say, will be a month or 2 before I buy so things would have most likely changed.