notsoscary

Okay, before i actually pay for anything, here is what i've picked out just wanna make sure there is nothing i have missed out or have made some really bad choices. Motherboard: GigaByte 965P-DS3 LGA-775, DDR2, PCI-E, SATA2, GBLan, ATX CPU: Intel Pentium D 935 3.2Ghz Dual Core LGA Processor Graphics Card: Sapphire 512Mb Radeon X1950 Pro PCI-Express VGA Card Hard Drive: 200GB W. Digital Caviar SE 7200RPM 8Mb Cache IDE Hard Drive Case: Duke Silver Case Black Front with 500W ATX2 24pin PSU Memory : 2x2gb DDR2 PC2 5300 Monitor : GNR TS902D 19" LCD Black Silver DVI 8ms Monitor Sound devices: Trust SC-5250 5.1 Surround Sound Card w/Digital &Optical Logitech X-530 - PC Multimedia Home Theatre Speaker System DVD RW : HP DVD1040i 20x DVD+/-RW,DL,RAM & Lightscribe v2 Oh, and a mouse and keyboard, don't think i could have gone wrong with those so i won't bother listing them. It all comes to about £658.66 (+p&p and vat).

My only worry about vista is backwards compatibility, would i have to download endless amounts of patches to get my older games and software to work? Like i have to do for alot of my old dos and win95 games on xp? Anyway, checked out those sites and thanks again for all the help. notsoscary

Yeah, the £700 includes a monitor, although i have a mass of old monitors lying around the house, i thought i'd get myself a new tft to go with the new p.c (any links to dirt cheap 21" Tft monitors would be greatly appreciated). Thanks for that website by the way, checking out stuff on it at the moment, another question though i should probably buy my own copy of xp, i don't think microsoft would be too happy at me using my parents copy, so should i stick with xp home or is it worth forking out a few more pounds for xp pro or even vista? Thanks again. Notsoscary

Okay, so i'm moving out of the family house soon and will no longer be able to use the family p.c, so i need to get my own. I figure building the p.c myself would be much cheaper and i already know how to do it all. What i need help with is what hardware i should get to build a gaming p.c for a budget of £700. I mostly need help with the motherboard/cpu, theres so many different kinds and i'm a little clueless as to what which ones is good for gaming and which aren't, also i'd like to find a nice medium to high graphics card thats easy on the purse strings that can handle wow and c&c 3 smoothly as i play those games the most and i am thinking about a soundcard, don't need anything fancy, but any cheap suggestions would be appreciated. Finally, i'd like to know what kind power source i'd need to run it all. As for the rest of the things i need to build my own p.c, such as the memory and whatnot, i think i can handle myself. Well, any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. Notsoscary

Okay, this is gonna be a very long post, so bare with me.... I have a hp Pavillion 424.uk, a fairly standard p.c when i bought it, but being an avid gamer i soon realised i needed to upgrade, since then i bought new memory and a new graphics card (Crucial RADEON x700 agp), everything worked great for months, with only a few problems with some games, but they were bugs with the game and not my p.c, i couldn't of been happier, but then my main harddrive started to go wrong, started making clicking sounds and soon enough my computer wouldn't start, i tried to get a professional to fix it, but they said it was unrepairable, so i ended up having to buy a new harddrive and a copy of Windows XP home edition. After re-installing all my drivers and software i thought everything would be back to normal, but no, my computer is having some really strange issues with my graphics card, for some reason it detects 8 "video controllers (vga comptable)", although i can install these controllers it also installs a new monitor for each (even though there is only one monitor connected) and by the 8th one the monitor goes back and makes the same clicky sound like when you try to change resolution. This forces me to reboot and instead of the standard windows xp welcome screen i get a blue screen saying windows has been shut down to prevent damage to the computer, with possibly the only relevant information on the screen being this "STOP 0x0000007F (0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x0000000)" i think i may have got the number of zeros wrong on that, but anyway, i have to reboot and use "last know good settings" or safe mode, uninstalling the drivers is the only way i can get back into windows, although sometimes it displays all 8 video controlers as installed saying i have 8 radeon x700's but the computer is still running on onboard video. I know for a fact that there should on be two video controllers, a RADEON x700 and the RADEON x700 (secondary). On three seemingly random occaisions the computer actually gets it right and the video card works although rebooting or turning off the computer just means it'll go back to the original problem. I've tried replicating the conditions of the three times it worked, but each time the settings were different and replicating them has no effect. This problem is driving me insane, i've submitted this problem to ati and hp but they haven't got back to me at all (its been a month now). From what i can gather, there isn't a problem with my computer itself, as everything worked fine under the original windows install that came with it when i bought the computer, rather the problem lies with the new xp install, there must be some driver or some piece of software missing from the new install that hp had put on my p.c to begin with, which is now totally inaccessable due to the harddrive its on being completely useless (except as a paperweight). Anything anyone can suggest to help me with this would be greatly appreciated! Bob. Heres my current computer specs: Hp Pavillion 424.uk Windows XP SP2 768mb DDR SDRAM (1x 256mb, 1x512mb) 2.4ghz Intel Pentium 4 MS-6577 v2.x (Xenon 3) Motherboard Intel 845G-B Chipset AGP 4x Graphics connector Crucial Radeon x700 - 256MB DDR SDRAM 1x 120gig Harddrive 1x 80gig Harddrive Any further computer information available on request.