First off, for your budget, getting a decent overclocked 8800GT such as the one you added is your best graphics card for budget.
I have seen some cheaper RAM about, however I need to ask you a question regarding this, what operating system are you using? Vista requires more RAM than XP to run efficiently.
I will have to look for you really on Aria, I have always used Micro-Direct.co.uk, I find a lot of the times Aria is a tad struck for choice.
A soundcard isnt really needed, and to be honest, you need to fork out for one with SPU (sound processing unit), whereas the cheaper ones arent. As these have a hardware sound processor while relieves the CPU of having to process sounds. At any rate I recommend an X-Fi Fatality card which you could buy at a later date.
Your keyboard choice is good, best keyboard I ever got
8800GT > 8800GTS in performance, so yea The Alpha dog XXX definatly the best.
Having looked at your mobo, it might seem a little off on choice. Your paying for the fact that it supports DDR3 ram really, thus not buying DDR3 ram as your selection is DDR2 is just wasting the feature. This mobo I would recommend, simply because of the chipset (680i LT). You'll get everything you need on this mobo. If you are wondering why it is 'LT' that does stand for lite edition, click here for a table detailing what its missing from the 680i normal.
That mobo also has Sli, which offers future upgradability of getting another graphics card (of course they need to be the same). On current chipsets/motherboards/drivers, SLi will grant you on average about 1.8-1.9X performance over normal, from personal testing. If indeed you are interested in the SLi, for a future possible upgrade you will need the 600W PSU, 500W is pushing it.
This ram choice would seem better to me to be honest. OCZ has lifetime warranty on all of its products, and I will recommend them for RAM till the day I stop building computers. The best thing is they are built to take overclocking too, and your warranty will still be legally valid till you rise the voltage up past a certain point (if you are thinking of overclocking).
Also why 2 hard drives? Are you thinking of using the RAID function?
Thanks again Spaced! I have updated my list to reflect your suggestions.
Ill also go and price up the same list with Micro Direct. As you mentioned, Aria seems to be lacking stock of half the list - doh!
I was wondering about 500w vs 600w psu - the price difference isnt much. I play alot of games but dont really need mad resolutions. 1600x1200 would be my max for the forseable future.
Im tempted to go for 4GB ram but I hear 4GB can slow systems down, or just not be used. Cheers.
Your right 4GB isnt really used, but Vista is a different story and seems to appreciate that jump from 2 to 4. Many people will probably say theres slowdown from 2-4GB simply because 2GB (2 X 2Gb) sticks tend to have higher timings.
Personally I would go with 600W, if you are interested in the soundcard that will again push the wattage needed, 2 HDDs too, 600W I'd say is the safe PSU, you've saved money on the mobo anyway from your previous choice (BTW why 2 HDDs? Personal preference?)
hehehhe - I like to have an Install Drive & a Backup drive. I use alot of backup so i dont wanna stress main drive. Also I need to spend as much of budget now so I dont waste it on crap later. Also how sweet to have 2 matching drives, never had that before. What is all this raid stuff? can i RAID? is RAIDING safe?
RAID has 3 variations. (there are more but dont tend to be at the consumer end, these are the ones relevant to your motherboard)
1. Using 2 hard-drives in sync, giving you more bandwidth therefore speeding up loading/saving times and performance. This however means it doubles your chances of data loss. (RAID 0)
2. Mirrored HDDs, each HDD writes the same things. Effectively this will give you only 320GB of total data, the advantages are minimal loss of data. Its basically a backup HDD. (RAID 1)
3. This needs 4 HDDs, and is a mix of variations 1 and 2 (RAID 0+1)
What three? I wonder if it is worth paying extra for overclocked card if you can OC it yourself. If you get it for basicly the same price and/or do not know about OCing, then maybe yes.
Only if you talk about the old (G80. i.e 320MB or 640MB) GTS versions. The new G92 (512MB) version is faster. It makes no sense getting the old GTS version (at least for the old price). Also getting G80 GTX or ultra is not wise imho. Only 8800s worth at the moment are the G92 ones.
Yeah original poster, get that 8800GT OR G92 8800GTS 512MB, one GTS is old G80, and G92 is newer, ALOT faster etc. So, 8800GT or G92 8800GTS 512MB.
So it would be like this:
New G92 8800GTS 512mb>8800GT 512mb>old G80 8800GTS.
Offcourse the G92 8800GTS is most expensive out of these three, but performance is VERY equal to 8800GTX, the difference between G92 8800GTS and 8800GTX is only few FPS, and in some cases G92 8800GTS is even faster...
Yep, get that one (or similar). I have G92 8800GTS too. It's a damn fast card and for about half the price of Ultra. And it is often faster than Ultra too (except maybe in very high resolutions).
Ive used them a lot and ive generally found thier prices to be as good as anywhere. Also thier returns policy is very good - they even send the courier to collect you rma free of charge
sometimes ebuyer is a bit mainstream and doesnt have the more exotic stuff in which case my first port of call is here
I have to say that the 8800GT is a stonking card with a pretty low power requirement. However the new GTS is definately faster than the GT but im in two minds wheather or not the poerformance gain is worth the price increase.
Also this card has a slightly higher clock than the alpha dog and is £199.97 and has 10 year waranty in uk (from overclockers)
core 675 (alpha dog 640)
shader 1674 (alpha dog 1500)
mem 1950 (alpha dog 1900)
Livetime waranty (10 year in uk tho i think) - alpha dog 2 year waranty
All in all I would say you have a nicely balanced and powerful system there although I dont really think its possible to buy a PC that is future proofed for 3 yrs nowadays lol :P
Cheers Bolders thats interesting with the graphics card. I should probably go for the best i can get because i dont know when ill get the chance again. Seems like the new GT is a great card for a great price BUT i can push to a new GTS so it should last abit longer than the gt, in theory - lol.
Thx for all the input everyone. OK ive updated to a XFX GeForce 8800GTS Alpha Dog 512MB PCI-E for £230 ish. Is this card OK with the Mobo? I will place order next week so Ill have a good look at all the other sugested sites. Cheers again.
Oh, anyone got any case recomendations. Ive never paid more that about £30-40 for a case. I only chose the Akasa Zen because it is cheap and comes with 2 fans! There is alot of choice going into hundreds of pounds.
Ok I need a race after all this Hardware talk, to refill my head with my bad driving rather than RamDacs & FSMs!
Its either an incredibly stupid decision or an incredibly evil and calculated decicion (the cynic in me believes the latter) by nVidia to call their new card by exactly the same name as their old card.
I imagine a lot of shops have old, unsold stocks of the old GTS cards sice the GT came out and to someone who doen't know much about the technology, a 640MB GTS is going to look a lot more tempting than a (far superior) 512MB GTS.
Yeah, 600W should be more than enough for your setup. I've only got a 520W and that's powering a 125W processor, 4 sticks of RAM, 5 HDDs, a 6800GT and a bunch of peripherals without issue...
Either one will work fine for SLi. I don't see any point though in getting a GTS over a GT since it's really just a tiny speed difference for a larger price. Besides, two GT cards in SLi will be PLENTY
You don't NEED 4 Gb of RAM, but I have it. The way I see it, never get a PC with less than 1 GB (I'm talking about XP here, Vista needs even more) as XP will usually need around 512 MB when it's up and running, and you want SOME RAM for your actual programs. For that reason, 2 Gb is much better, as it leaves plenty of room for running applications. 4 Gb is still, even to this day, a bit overkill, but it really depends on what you use it for. I have 4 Gb just so that I don't even have to THINK about how much memory is free, as even with 2 Gb, you can get close to the limit with certain programs. Hech, X-Plane (a flight simulator I use on occasion) likes to eat up 2 Gb all on its own. I'm assuming Jakg recommended 4 Gb because the rest of your computer is pretty high-spec and is fairly future-proof for the time being, so you may as well get 4 Gb now, since you'll likely need it in the near future.
And if you plan on running Vista... well, I'll quote this from another site:
"Microsoft's on-the-box minimum RAM requirement "really isn't realistic," according to David Short, an IBM consultant who works in its company's Global Services Divison. He says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's "sub-XP," he warned.
Short has been beta testing Vista for two years and was at the IBM-oriented Share user group conference in Tampa, Fla., last week discussing some of Vista's performance requirements. His XP system has 2GB of RAM, which he calls the "sweet spot" for that operating system, but on Vista, 4GB of RAM may be closer to its "Nirvana," he said."
Nope. They're two entirely separate things. Just make sure you get DDR2-800 RAM and you'll be fine.
There is no physical difference in a RAID setup, so yes it is a "BIOS thing." Your hard drives will be connected to the SATA ports on your mobo as usual. All it does is "program" the drives so that they show up as one big drive. What it does is that when reading and writing to the drives, it goes ACROSS both of them. Imagine writing data to your hard drive like spreading butter on bread. If your drives are not RAID, you can spread butter on two slices of bread one at a time. RAID is the equivalent of lining both slices of bread up next to each other and spreading the butter across both at the same time. Benefit for you is you get the capacity of both drives, but without the hassle of having a C: drive and a D: drive and trying to decide how to split your files (if you're a neat freak like me, that can be annoying.) Benefit of your computer is that it uses both drives at the same time, meaning it can get twice the bandwidth out of them.
Yeah, but don't count on it being something terribly noticeable. You might get a few seconds out of it, but really, that's not one of the main reasons you should do it.
I honestly have no idea, but as long as they don't come back, I don't really care
That's a decision that has a lot to do with what kind of audio setup you have. If you just use speakers on a monitor, or just two standard PC speakers, or even headphones, onboard is plenty capable of delivering good quality sound. If you have a more expensive setup (a 5.1 setup, or some really nice Logitech speakers) you stand to benefit more from a sound card upgrade. I can attest to the remarkable difference a good card can make. My motherboard came with a TINY 5.1 surround PCI-1x sound card (basically onboard, but I guess a bit better.) I always found it sounded fine on my Logitach 5.1 system. About 5 months ago I started getting hissing and whining out of the speakers, and assumed that the sound card was going bad. I kind of splurged and got an Asus Xonar Sound Card, and OH MY GOD. I swear, of all the upgrades I've done to my computer, this was BY FAR, the most rewarding one ever. These speakers sound MUCH BETTER, MUCH CLEARER, and the high-end sounds actually exist now. Plus, I can turn the speakers up to 100% without hiss (I could never go more than halfway on the dial, but I assumed that was just standard hiss that you get out of everything when you crank the volume.) EVERYTHING about the sound is a million times better. I will never ever build a computer without a good sound card again.
Your description of RAID was actually of JBOD. RAID is making an array of disks - it has various modes. the best (IMO) is RAID0, in which you get one big drive show up which is almost twice the speed of a single drive.
Yeah, sorry, I kind of wrote that post up really quickly and then revised it. In the past 10 minutes I've edited it about 15 times, lol. I shouldn't have posted it until I got everything explained correctly. I was editing the RAID thing as you posted that. I tend to get impatient when writing long posts.
Actually Jakg, question: Obviously, striping your hard drives gives you better performance. Mirroring them degrades performance (I believe.) The way my four drives are set up are striped and mirrored. Is that setup faster or slower than a standard drive? Do the effects cancel out? I've always been curious.
4GB probably is overkill but its nice although be aware that a 32bit OS will probably only see between 2.5 an 3GB of it.
Ram speed does not need to match the graphics card. DDR2 800MHZ/ PC2 6400 is probably a good choice for performance/ price although go for the modules with lower timings i.e 4,4,4,12 or 4,4,4,15. DDR2 1066MHz/ PC2 8500 is top spec memory but has a high cost compared to the 800MHz stuff I dont think its worth the extra cost personally as it will only give you a few percent increase in system performance but costs about twice as much. Id rather have 4GB of 800MHz than 2GB of 1066MHz
Raid is supported at the board/ chipset level - the hard drive connections to the MB remain the same - all raid systems ive seen are configured just after post and before booting to OS. However the results ive seen for raid have not been that spectacular and have only offered a small increase in performance but there is greater risk associated with it. If one drive fails you loose all data from both drives if you are running striped raid. Now RAID 5 is a different matter Id love to be running that on my server but the cost is far to great.
TO SLI or not to SLI
Sli is one of those things that works quite well for some games but gives hardly any advantage in others. I would personnaly rather buy a single faster card than 2 slower cards in SLI. However I do have an SLI board and i am so glad that I have. The reason is that ive just discovered softTH. This is free software that enables you to run a tripple head setup as long as you can get 2 PCI-E graphics cards in your system. Only one card does the rendering so the second card can be a cheap one as its only used to ouput to a display. The result is that I have got 3 monitors running in LFS and I love it. However the best idea is to identify what games your going to be playing and have a look at some benchmarks from a site like this
you will have to look around a bit to find the right article for you - sorry i dont have time to im supposed to be studying
PSU
I can absolutely garantee that the PSU you have selected will be more than powerfull enough. I have just fitted an 8800GT into a machine (not mine unfortunately ) which is running a 350watt PSU. Its also running an AMD 64 3200+ 2GD DDR ram and all the normal bits. I recon the total system draw is about 250 watts although cant tell for sure untill ive put a power meter on it.
the bees have gone into hibernation - they will be back in the spring :P
/edit wow last 3 posts appeared whilst i was writing
stripped mirrored RAID will give you increased performance as well as reliability although you loose half of your total capacity by running this configuration. Theoretically RAID 0 (I think thats striped raid) should give you twice the preformance but quite simply it does not.
Just FTR, i can run SoftTH on my Crossfire motherboard, too, and crossfire motherboards are generally cheaper than SLi boards. Of couse, you dont need SLi OR Crossfire for 2x graphics cards for SoftTH, but it's rare to find a board with to PCI-e slots where both are faster than 4x without Crossfire or SoftTH.
The Alpha dog XXX definatly the best. 
