Newbie here, What should I do????

1. its a personal preference. currently intel holds the performance crown but that could change.
2. there is no need to worry about the cpu frying, the pentium has a circuit built in that prevents it from getting too hot.
3. that also is a personal preference, some people say rambus is better, some say ddr. i really dont know.
4. unless you are working on some serious video editing, a gig of ram is an overkill. 512 is plenty for the average joe gamer.
5. i think they are similar in performance, i am a little partial to ati if all 3d things are equal. ati's 2d and tv out performance cant be beat.
6. mid tower is good. i would recomend an enermax case from newegg. i would also recomend buying every thing from newegg.com

how do you shoot the devil in the back? what happens if you miss? -verbal

"What processor should I get??? I'm thinking of a AMD2200 XP+, P4 2.8G or a P4 2.6G and maybe over clocking the fsb to 133"

If your thinking of getting the P4 2.6G and overclocking the FSB to 133, I strongly suggest ya get the 2.5GHz P4 with 400MHz FSB instead. Both processors have the revised northwood core. The 2.6G ($413 retail at newegg.com) differs from the 2.5 P4 ($255 retail at newegg.com) only by cpu multipier and default clock speed. 2.6G has a CPU multiplier of 26 and 2.5 has a CPU multiplier of 25. Is having +1 cpu multiplier worth another $158 bucks, i don't think so. Use that extra money to strengthen weaker links in your system.

"Who drunk my apple juice?!"

Thanks for the advice With the lower price the 2.5 looks the better choice, so what cooling would be need for the 533Fsb???

Also I just added a case fan to my current system and so far so good @150FSB thats 675 whoa-hoo 5 hours so far  

buy a dell and stop worrying about it.


<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=9933" target="_new"> My Rig </A>

Well if you go the P4 route, Rambus is your best bet. It's a bandwidth hungry CPU and needs to be fed to be most effective. As for Ram amount, win98 flavors give the best performance up to 256MB, NT flavor 512. Both will perform better with more memory, but once you hit those 'magic numbers' the performance increase drops off dramatically.
I'd recommend against the 2200+ since it didn't scale well early on. I'd look for 1800+ to 2000+ ,around $100 or wait till just after the first of the month and look at the 2400+. As for P4's, I'd consider the 2.4a flavor currently running around the $200 range. I'd stick with a Geforce 3 Ti500 and save the $75. A few frame rates isn't that big of a deal. I doubt it'll make your gameplay any more enjoyable. As for a case, that's hard to say. I own a Super Flower black anodized aluminum and I love it. 11 bays with space for 4 hd's right in front of the two intake fans at the bottom. Lian Li's are also pretty sweet. Just go tool less case, one that allows removal of the board with removing the expansion cards(easier for cleaning) and a really nice powerful PSU. A good case will last you several upgrades.


:cool: Save heating costs on your home, overclock your PC!!! :cool:

stock cooling should be fine.

<font color=blue> If it ain't broke, don't fix it...tweak it.</font color=blue>