yeh I agree go for nvidia, less graphics driver issues and much easier to get new drivers.

Also you might wanna get another 1gb of ram, less loading time and less stress for your cpu.

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Yeah, I was thinking about that this morning when looking at the vid cards. I probably will but I have to speak to the bank manager first and get approval from her

Edited February 4, 200719 yr by Skooby

dont buy an expensive video card yet wait until the mid range geforce 8000 series cards come out dx10 is out now no point spending good money on a dx9 card

A DirectX 9|10 card? Cards are hardware. It's the software that must support the hardware not the other way around.

Okay motherboard can be purchased from http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/PARTS.pdf for $118.00

Thermaltake Soprano Midi Tower with 430w PSU $125.00

I would go the Adata 1G Kit(2x512M)A-DATA 800 for $155.00. Higher bandwidth.

Western Digital W.D. SATA/320G $128.00

16x Pioneer 111D Silver oem Drive Only $45.00 same as your 55$ one

256MB 7950GT Leadtek $345.00

and then if you add cpu total is $956. If you still wanted to use ATI card you could use this one as it has 512meg memory 512MB PowerColour X1950Pro is $325.00 all bought from link above.

Or you could goto Centrecom http://www.centrecom.com.au/systemparts.pdf 320G SATA II 16M $135.00 get this 1 better than 8meg version

Gigabyte M55 Plus-S3G $117.00

16x Pioneer 111D Silver $49.00

ATI Asus X1950Pro 256M PCIE 299/Gigabvte X1950Pro 256Mb 305

Nvidia Winfast 7950GT 256Mb PCIE 355

Goto to this site http://www.staticice.com.au/ todo price checks. lists cheapest places. If you find cheaper prices I buy a lot of parts off Centrecom Seaford and most times they will price match other stores. Scorptec is ususually a little dearer than anyone else.

Edited February 4, 200719 yr by stevenrad13

A DirectX 9|10 card?  Cards are hardware.  It's the software that must support the hardware not the other way around.

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Exactly cards are Hardware and cost alot of money.

Software change to support the new standard is easy as installing Vista.

You cant make a dx9 card run dx10 software.

Buy your hardware to support new software standards as they come out not the other way around will stop you having a pile of old hardware laying around

Edited February 4, 200719 yr by crans

Oh yeh, I would stay away from that motherboard too as it allready has onboard graphics. You don't need this. If your going to use Gigabyte use this one GA-M55SLI-S4 its $115.00 at MSY or $117.00 at Centrecom. Here is the link to board page

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mother...me=GA-M55SLI-S4

Has everything other board except no onboard graphics. You want to stay away from this being onboard as you have less slots for upgrading later. If you decided later on you could buy another graphics cards same one as you purchase and run then in SLI, better graphics performance again.

Its grossly inaccurate to say there are ram issues with dual core intel cpus. No idea who told you that, but its not a correct statement. If people are having ram issues, it will be caused by their motherboard. It would be a very well publicised world wide scandal if there was some kind of problem with any intel cpu and ram....because the vast majority of people use intel cpus....

You would be mad not to go a dual core intel cpu. Buy the base level E4300 for around $240. Well worth the extra $80 or so. It will kick ass over the AMD. AND its highly over-clockable, so if you decide its not quick enough later, you can boost the speed tons by just adding a better fan for $50 or so and playing with some bios settings.

Multi-thread games are about to start coming out. They will make very good use of 2 cores, and performance will be much better than the AMD chip you mention. Lots of apps already run multiple threads so will run lots better on a dual core setup.

Everything else you mention is fine. Spend the extra $80 and go the dual core. You would be insane not to (and change to an appropriate motherboard for it). The RAM is fine and can run faster than it officially does.

2 cores also makes normal day to day tasks (of single threaded apps) run much, much quicker. As soon as you multitask it suddenly is very quick to do everything instead of the PC slowing down. Anyone telling you multi-cores are of not much use yet as there are few multi thread apps doesnt know what they are talking about. Attached/below is a screen dump picture of my PC vegetating...it shows processes running and also the number of threads for each of them. As you can see, there are VERY few single thread processes! Not to mention windows can load balance and show single thread apps to whichever cpu it wants.

AMD's next gen of cpu may be worth looking at as its design is interesting, but currently the intel C2D's and C2Q's kick them in most ways.

The guy who mentioned DirectX 10 gaming is spot on, but at the moment there are few cards that support DirectX10 so the prices are very high: outside of your budget. Best to look at one of them once prices start to drop. And having DirectX10 is a very, very big deal. This year it will cause the biggest jump in gaming graphics and quality ever. The games are stunning. You can find screen shots of some directx10 games in development if you look on Google. First one is due any day now, a couple more in March, and some mid to late year.

I have pretty good knowledge of PC's, programming and windows so not your average Joe when it comes to this stuff. Below are the stats of my home PC which I just built:

Intel QX6700 quad core 2.66GHz -> 3.05GHz (and climbing...)

Nvidia 8800GTX vid card

2GB Corsair XMS2 Dominator PC-9136 RAM with fans

Asus P5W64-WS-Pro

Swiftech H20 Apex Ultra water cooling: cpu and northbridge

Thermaltake Toughpower 750w PSU

2 x striped WD Raptor 10k 150GB boot drives

2 x 320GB Sata2 Raid1 mirrored drives

1.25TB of Sata2 data drives.

And no ram problems to be seen

Yeah I'm with the others on this, get an nVidia card (I'm speaking as someone with an ATI card who is about to change back) as ATI are very clingy with drivers and information to create good drivers (worried that competitors will find out "how it's done" and copy them)

As for the RAM your getting how much are you planning on putting in your system, it looked like you where only talking about 1GB in your final spec sheet... If so up your RAM, 2GB minimum...

I'm also with mickq on some of the points, whilst I am more for AMD (they have the potential to preform much faster than similar priced Intels) absolutely go the dual core chips if the budget can stretch. Whilst it's true software (and games) do work best with duel core if they have been optimised for it, the OS will use both cores.

Just my 2c...

Thanks for your help guys.

Well I'm finally convinced to go with the Core 2 duo. I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to finding something I like and sticking with it. But the advice and reviews have swung me around.

I'll also go with the 2bg ram. I had all intentions of eventually going up to 2gb but didn't want to break the budget. But this will make it easier to wait for the supposed drop in prices on the graphics cards in March. I can also see how much the mid-range DX10 cards will be when they are released - although I don't think I'll be able to afford one.

As for the mobo, I'm going to stick with the gigabyte name and get one of those GA-965G-DS3 boards. Unless someone can point me in the direction of something roughly the same for cheaper.

Thanks again