Ok Gaming rig or Casio Computer? advice gladly received!

Looks good overall.

With a 800GTS you should be playing at 1280x1024 at least.

I used to have an Audigy Platinum, bought a X-Fi Platinum, and I'm glad I did. :wink:

The 8800 is a nice graphics card but you need a good sized monitor to use the power.
The RAM is real good, and for overclocking might be just the right type, but you really need 2GBs.
The sound card is good if you are really into gaming and music sounds, but most people like me could live with onboard sound. It costs nothing to try what you have and upgrade if needed.
Rest of the build are solid pick, you will come out with a super system.

I'd look at the seagate's 320GB drive price... They are much of a much, both are good. Question would be can you save a penny?

Asus is on my sh1tlist ATM, but that's just me. I'd check out some DFI MB's. (others are starting to rave about MSI, but have no experience, so can't comment)

I take it to mean that you are going to get either / or one of the GPU cards and not both? If so, ATM I'd go with the NV, but be aware that the AMD/ATI R6xx's are very near to launch.

Just some food for thought, if you got just what you spec'd I am sure you'd be happy.

cutthroat: cheers think u may have swayed me there because i wasnt dead keen on the idea of a cream drive sticking out of my black Antec. have u had any problems with ur X-fi because ive noticed many have problems with drivers, mind u creative dont seem to have the best drivers from my experience...which is rather limited haha

alcattle:my monitor is a Medion flat pro 19" As for the ram sorry i had knocked it off the excel page i had all this listed on (to try all the different options and see the final price  , even tried a E6600 but that bumps the price to £839.50) but this ram is 2x1gb sticks. Soundwise this is going to be my sort of media centre and i have a creative inspire 5.1 Digital so i didnt wanna let the speakers down by having onboard but it worth thinking of onboard if i wanted to save some money... Thanks by the way, i hope i can just build it!

croc: from the websites i looked at it turn out like this
320 Gb Seagate Barracuda £58.15
320 Gb Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 16mb £57.68
is it the reverse normally?

Why is Asus on ur sh1tlist by the way? ok i've been looking at some DFI motherboards, the Infinty and Lanparty, both seem reasonable, as im not planning on buying till mid april ill have a look at a few more reviews. thanks for the suggestion. oww ps do u think mid Apri could be a launch time for AMD/ATI R6xx or reckon it might get pushed back further... i thought about this u see as the both as the Connect3D X1950XT thrashed all the Geforce 7 series cards in a large review i just read and it was cheaper than most!

by the way im more than happy to recieve ur ideas, ive never built a system b4 but i think ive been hit by a building bug!

By the way how do i find out what my monitors native res is?

I spend more time on overclocking forums than regular ones. So bear with me.

I don't know what Tom's meant. Difficult as in spending more time to find a working overclock? Perhaps. My DQ6 is like that. I imagine all P965 mobos overclock with cpu/ram linked/synched. It's the hard way. The easy way to o/c c2d is to get a 650i/680i mobo (o/c with unlinked/unsynched cpu/ram ratio. You can o/c cpu & ram independently).

I just helped a friend o/c his pc from e6600's 2.4ghz to 3.6ghz on evga 680i. His mobo is not like many that have bugs. His is revision A2. Not even on evga site (A1/T1). We haven't encountered bugs other than the PS/2 bug (non-responsive ps/2 keyb/mouse; use USB instead). I narrowed it down to one thing: he just has to change the FSB to o/c his pc. Of course, do some tests to ensure stability. Default FSB is (1066 / 4) x 9 = 2398.5 or 2.4 ghz. I just set ram timings & voltage to specs & upped FSB to 1600 (1700-1750 is no o/c zone or FSB strap). Everything else on auto. It passed memtest with flying colors.

With P965 mobos, you'd have to link cpu & ram at a ratio. Most prefer 1:1 ratio. i.e. 400 FSB mhz : 400 RAM mhz. e4300 has x9 multiplier. 9 x 400 = 3.6ghz (fat chance; most 4300 I've seen o/c to about 3.0ghz). RAM will be at stock 800Mhz. I think that's what Tom's meant by difficult. P965 has a FSB strap where the o/c will fail no matter what. I think P5B-DX's is 370-400mhz.

On the 680i, it was 1 try = o/c success. On my DQ6, it was like 30 tries + time for stability tests.

The 320MB 8800GTS is best around 1280x1024.

akhilles: its mentioned in these two articles 'Overclocking Guide Part 3: How To Gain 81% For £20', the review of the Gigabyte is on 'Shootout at the Core 2 Corral: Seven P965 Motherboards Compared' but ye basically Toms is showing people how to overclock and believe that using the Gigabyte is going to benefit more. The Asus appeals to be because ive read a few reviews that say the bios is really clear.

heyyou27: cheers, i currently hav Geforce 4400ti   so cant push it to 1280x1024 i dont think