tanks guys. liek i rellay need teh help.. so i should change motherboard? or graphics card? i only have 1300 dollars :s You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.

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Aaagghh! When I first read this I could not believe my eyes. An SLI board with ATI???? So I calmed down and came back later to see Saber's reply. Whew.....Breath, breath. :) Yes you need to reconfigure! With this setup above, the 7600GT would be an excellant choice for about the same money as the X800GT. And you get 12 pixelpipelines instead of 8. Much better choice. And later if your heart desires you can add another one for SLI. Thats a good motherboard but I would go with the DFI nforce4 SLI X16 and save some bucks. But thats problably not an option? As mentioned get a better PSU. One that is SLI ready. Corsair Value RAM will suffice and save you some bucks. So you can stay in your budget and get a much better system. Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Corsair 512X4 2048mb 2X WD Raptor 74gb 10K RAID 0 250gb WD Caviar 2X 256 6800 GT WinXP Pro X64

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Personally I don't like WD hard disks, too slow, always used Samsung or SeaGate. Also, 1Gb RAM + 7900 GT will be much faster than 2Gb RAM + X800GT. The Gigabyte GA-K8s are also good motherboards. p.s. don't forget you need a floppy drive to install a SATA hard disk!

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"Personally I don't like WD hard disks, too slow, always used Samsung or SeaGate" Hmmmmm. Not sure I agree. Samsung and Seagates are darn good drives but are they faster? It depends on what your benchmark is. I find that apples and apples the WD can hold their own. And if you're not comparing apples to apples then in most cases the Raptors are faster. http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html Guess its just a personal preference. Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Corsair 512X4 2048mb 2X WD Raptor 74gb 10K 2X 256 6800 GT Raid-0 WinXP Pro X64

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"2 - I myself own the A8N-SLI Deluxe and I love it. It's louder than all get out, but it works and it's reasonably easy to overclock. I think you'll find that the DFI Lanparty is better board though." Get the "Premium" versino instead of the "Deluxe". The premium version uses a heat pipe on the northbridge chip instead of a fan. No noise. "p.s. don't forget you need a floppy drive to install a SATA hard disk!" No, you don't. That is only true if you use the non-native SATA ports on the mohterboard. With NForce 4 (and 3 I think) there are 4 native SATA controllers on the board. You do not need to install F6 drivers when installing Windows. I also agree that you should pay a few bucks more and get a DVD burner. Also, you may want to consider getting another power supply. The PSUs that come with those cheap cases are also cheap and could cause you problems. Michael J

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hey thanks alot guys. May i ask (since a am a total beginner into building computers) i think i know what ATI and SLI is. But may i ask for your definistions, as i am quite unsure. :S thanks You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.

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The two major companies in the Video Card industry are ATI and nVidia. Video cards with their chipsets are manufactured by many different companies. Basically any GeForce card is an nVidia chipset. Raedeon cards are ATI chipsets. Like AMD vs. intel many people prefer one over the other. Each ahs it's strong suits and shortcommings. SLI (nVidia) and Crossfire (ATI) are technologies created by the above two companies that allow you to run two video cards in tandem to increase performance. You can only pair two nVidia cards on an SLI motherboard OR two ATI cards on a Crossfire motherboard. And then there are motherboards that do not support either - in which case you can't run two cards in tandem (some do allow two cards, but only for dual monitors). Michael J

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"Also, 1Gb RAM + 7900 GT will be much faster than 2Gb RAM + X800GT." That is a good point. But do get a floppy for maintenance reasons. They come in handy for possible firmware upgrades, ASR disks, other boot disks, etc. For a fast drive, also consider Hitachi. I would choose Seagate and Hitachi over WD for reliability reasons. "Milk was a bad choice!"

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i think make it 2gb of RAM and an Nvidio hgraphcis card so later you can add a second for SLi. otherwise, no point in buying an SLi board. a 10,000rpm hard drive may also be in order. HP Vectra VL400 1.0ghz Pentium 3 512mb PC133 SDRAM 120gb 7200rpm 8mb cache WD1200JB hard drive ATI Radeon 9200 128mb AGP video card

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Forget the 10,000 RPM drive. Get two 7200's instead, and make the second one the drive for your games. That will do you more good than a single 10,000RPM drive. "Milk was a bad choice!"

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i meant a 10k drive for OS and games plus another 7,200rpm drive for other files and junk HP Vectra VL400 1.0ghz Pentium 3 512mb PC133 SDRAM 120gb 7200rpm 8mb cache WD1200JB hard drive ATI Radeon 9200 128mb AGP video card

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IMO, they're not worth the money for gaming applications. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina! www.redcross.org

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I have two computers. The one I am currently playing on just has a WD 250gb Corsair 7200 RPM. It is, as many say, sufficient for gaming. However, I can tell you I can't wait to return to my other computer. Everything loads so much faster, including windows, maps, games, and other applications. Eventaully, I may purchase a faster drive for the slower one. IMO its however you want your system to perform. If HDD read/write speed is not so important to you then its a complete waste of money. Because during actual game play, you won't see a difference. If you want to learn more to see if its worth it, check out this link and judge for yourself. http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Corsair 512X4 2048mb 2X WD Raptor 74gb 10K RAID 0 250gb WD Caviar 2X 256 6800 GT WinXP Pro X64

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Theoretical performance is great and all, but if you know how to properly tune your drives for performance, and buy multiple drives, it's not significant. The reality is you can buy 2x 250 gig 7200RPM SATA drives for the price of one 150GB WD 150GB 10,000RPM drive, and still pocket about $80, which is fairly close to going from 1GB to 2GB of RAM, which would cause less paging to the hard drives, and improve disk performance. In fact, I could buy almost 3 250 gig drives for the price of 1 150GB 10,000RPM drives. That would allow me to put OS on one spindle, the bulk of the page file on the second, and games on the third. In the end, I would have 750GB's of storage compared to a measily 150GB's of storage, and due to the additional spindles, would be performing probably about the same as a single 150GB 10K RPM drive. That's what the benchmarks leave out! As a network engineer with significant experience when it comes to storage performance, I appreciate high speed drives for the right application. If I'm running a busy database app, I want fast drives. I love 15K RPM SCSI drives for Exchange or SQL. But 10K RPM drives at the prices they are for gaming? It's a waste just as a 7900GTX SLI config is. Spend your money if you want to, but I'm pocketing mine for my next upgrade. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina! www.redcross.org

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