yeah, overclocking was designed as a way to buy something cheap and make it better over a shorter period of time (at which point it will be outdated anyway). paying out the ass for someone to overclock something is just throwing away money. if you have the money, ok, throw it away, you'll have a faster comp for a while at least. otherwise just stick to the normal overclocking route, or spend the money on a normal top of the line piece and use it the way its supposed to.

tl;dr TINSTAAFL

I say spend the money on top of the line, I did that and I'm still using the same machine I built 4-5 years ago. I've had no problems with hardware with the exception of blowing up my vid card by dropping a screw on it while my computer was on.

As for an OS, I'd say to go with the XP 64 version. I'm goin to go with that seeing as no one I know likes Vista and I dont really care to learn a new OS.

Doc, if your looking for a gaming machine, imo.. you should go with AMD, ATI & Asus. If you read all the reviews, AMD & ATI out perform all of Intel and nVidia systems. I've had an AMD/ATI/Asus machine for years, I'd never go with anything else. When I build my new system, it's gonna be AMD Phenom/ATI Crossfire/Asus. I'm actually gonna go with the AMD machine that I posted in a previous post, altho that one has a MSI mobo (I'm gonna use Asus), and I dont need the case, I have a much better ThermalTake case.

My old man could never understand why I spent the money I did on my current machine, however.. it's almost 5 yrs later now & mine still works great and he's been thru like 5-6 other systems himself that he keeps buying crap off ebay cuz it's cheap and building new ones. By the time you add up the cost of all 5 or 6 of his machines, it costs more than mine did when I originally bought it. When I got mine it was all top of the line stuff. My original vid card was a ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256 that I paid like $506 for new. Now I have a ATI/Sapphire 1650 Pro 512 in it, which was bought on ebay for like $80 to replace the one I blew up.

About the RAM, I'd suggest either Kingston or Corsair. I have Corsair in my puter. Both are very good.

Meh, I used to be a big AMD/ATI buff, but the truth being that for the price per performance Intel/Nvidia have just far surpassed AMD/ATI. Crossfires are outrageously expensive, and from what I don't understand don't outperform an SLI setup. Either way you don't need that much power anyway unless you plan on running Crysis at top graphics. (also, fuck canada).

As for AMD, they are far behind Intel in the multicore processor race. Or at least they were a few months ago and from what I understand nothing has changed. You'd end up spending twice as much for an AMD processor that performs just as well as an intel half the price.

And as for buying top of the line, why? Next month there will be a new top of the line. I've always done fine with mid priced or last month's top of the line hardware. In fact, the machine I am currently running (going on 5 years now) was middle priced when I built it. Its just a 9700 pro and an amd XP 2700+. AT the time I could have purchased a 9800 pro and a 3000 64 bit processor, but didn't see a reason to. Looking back, I still don't see a reason to. You need to upgrade in the same amount of time and honestly the 10% performance difference you might see between last months top of the line and this month's top of the line is not noticable.

If it were me, I would probably be going with the 3ghz processor, but as i said i'm building this for a friend and he's trying to fit within a 700$ budget before case/OS. If we had a budget of like 2,000$ I'd say maybe a high end AMD and a crossfire setup. But I would need to see some more benchmarks that prove to me crossfire outperforms SLI.

Well I been checking out this stuff over the past few months and all I did was google "amd vs intel" and "crossfire vs sli". All the stuff I've found on it says the AMD/ATI set up is the best. I'll look up some links for ya later, I'm busy at the moment with some stuff around here atm. <shrug>

And yes, I can certainly understand the "middle of the line" thing based on $ on hand. Thats why I dont have a new puter now. =]

When I redo mine, it'll be top of the line.. but it's gonna take some time to get it..

$30 more and it nets you a better chip (8800GTS) and a factory overclock on that. This happens to be the cheapest 8800gts G92 chip. It's the same price if you fill out the mail in rebate.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php ... &card2=544

Yeah that looks like a good find, but as i said, at the end we were really cutting corners to save cost. 30$ would have just broken the camel's back I think, or so it sounded like. I might put one of those on my machine when I get my tax refund back this year.

Bad bullgod! Bad! You go think about what you've done.

Unless you don't ever want to print, scan, use the vast majority of hardware, have compatability problems with a lot of software, and feel like searching for hacked 3rd party drivers for just about everything, stay the FUCK away from XP 64-bit. It has never been properly supported by Microsoft or other vendors. However, with 4gb of RAM, to use it fully you will need Vista 64bit, or Windows 2003 server 32-bit (don't believe XP allowed LBA, anyone know for sure?).

Being an AMD fan, this is hard to say, but Intel is leading the CPU market right now. The last 2 computers I put together used Q6600's (I just can't say no to quad-core...). Both are running great. Motherboard is a good choice. Solid caps are nice, and I've heard mostly good things about Gigabyte.

So ya, good choices. Should last you a good while. My last one (before moving to China) was an AMD XP2500+. A few minor upgrades and repairs (up to 2gb memory, replaced 2 power supplies, 2 video cards), but it lasted nearly 5 years, and still runs.

MS's website says XP 64 handles up to 128 Gigabytes of memory.

I think he ended up buying Vista 64 bit edition. I've heard whispers from microsoft saying they might cut off support for XP as early as this summer or as late as 2010. Either way, it already has a death sentence apparently. I agree with BS, its dumb to buy a new copy of a dying OS.

It was a whole 1+ years before i switched over to xp when it came out.

Buying top of the line is never a good idea, imo. Stuff depreciates in value so quick.
It is usually best to buy the upper end of the midrange for best price/performance and less buyers remorse.



64 bit XP is horrid.
I would suggest dual booting 32 XP and 64 Vistsa.



I would agree with you if you were saying this several years ago, but Intel and Nvidia are pretty much the better choice in most aspects.

64 Bit is something you don't need, unless you planning on having more ram than you should need. There's a reason 64 bit isn't common place. So i'm what, the 3rd person to tell you its a bad idea? So i guess that means 32bit + 2gb ram.

As for the graphics card, I think an 8800gt is right now the best bang for your buck. You can even pick one up for $180 open box on Newegg, my friend did it and it works just fine. If you want to sli them, which has a little bit more power than the 9800GX2 (I think) I would go with a mobo on a 780i chipset. The p35 would be my secondary choice, if for whatever reason you are anti 780i.

Although I don't really know that much about chip architecture to give you an informed decision of AMD vs Intels core duo vs Intels quad core. I however did buy myself the q6600 b0 stepping, and It over clocks like a champ. 3.2ghz at about 62C load.

Yes, but read what I said again. XP 64 has compatibility problems. Lots of them. LOTS of them. So, although you could install 128gb of memory, you would still have those compatibility problems. So, if you want more than 3gb of memory you need Server 2003 32bit, or Vista 64bit (or Linux, but that's a whole other discussion).

So far as I can tell, there are no problems running Vista 64-bit. I have it running on one of the computers here at work (new graphics workstation) without problems. Also, RAID 10 with 4x15,000 rpm Seagate Cheetah 15k.5 drives goes fast....very fast...

Actually on vista 64 you can't install non Microsoft certified drivers without special bootflags. I was under the impression that vista 64 bit was even worse than xp's.

Oh, I wasn't correcting you or anything, you asked if anyone knew for sure if XP 64 had LBA support, and I assumed you were talking about the ram amount. I was just saying that Microsoft says it does.

--Locane