SATA & SATAII are compatible, and tbh SATAII is a bit pointless.

It should have an IDE for CD-ROM drives, although everyone seems to jump on SATA drives these days...

Quote from Jakg :

SATA & SATAII are compatible, and tbh SATAII is a bit pointless.

So is it the same physical connection? As in a SATA II hard drive will work with a SATA motherboard just without the advantages of SATA II?

Yup, but a SATAII HDD will work in SATA mode, which tbh makes no real difference.

The ATA 330MB/sec means the board is a SATA II motherboard, although as Jakg says, that's backward compatible with SATA so any SATA drive will work ok on it. There's not much to choose between SATA and SATA II drives pricewise at the moment, and the performance usually isn't much difference, so given the choice, pick the drive which has the bigger cache size. ie 16Mb rather than 8Mb.

The UltraDMA133 is your IDE connection, so it's got a single IDE connector on the motherboard.

The best drives imo are the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10's, they aren't the fastest (Raptors got em there), but their close, while being a LOT cheaper and bigger.

Yeah, but the Raptor's are really enterprise class drives, rebadged and aimed at the hard-core gamers who're willing to shell out extra money for fractional improvements in speed.
Seagate drives are usually pretty solid, the ones that are interesting me at the moment though are the Western Digital Caviar drives. The specs and reviews for the 500Gb versions look pretty good at the moment.

The Seagate Barracuda's seem to be the best atm, tbh, the Maxtor Atlas is a little behind the Raptor, with the 7200.11 coming VERY close - now if only they made them in smaller sizes than 750 GB and i'd be interested...

I've been looking at ebay and it seems second hand 7600GTs are going for about £40 delivered (a saving of at least £15), what is the likely risk with a used graphics card? I guess they're fairly reliable and the saving is worthwhile? Anything to watch out for, are some 7600GTs (significantly) inferior to others?

If I was to buy a card off ebay I'd wait until I had everything else sitting waiting to go to make returns easier.

It could have been overclocked to hell and continually artefact, it could have a dodgy flash or it could just be dead.

Provided it's not sold "as is" or "untested" you should be ok though

Make sure it's a GT and don't bother with a 512 MB version

This was the card that looked tempting, seems like a genuine, but poorly written sale though I'm not going to go for it because I have nothing to test it on within a reasonable return time.

That looks like it'd be fine - it's always worth asking if it runs fine (ie works, or if it artefacts or whatever) so that if it is dodgy they can't say "oh you never asked, it works, just with artefacts" etc.

The spelling is a little suspicious, but he can answer the questions fine.

I've recently been introduced to Bioshock on a mates laptop (T7250 and 8600M) and have to say the visuals are rather impressive

So my question is will the processor I'm intending to get (E6550) be able to play new games for the next couple of years (obviously assuming I upgrade the graphics card) or would it hold the computer back and make upgrades pointless?

As for the graphics card, I've been looking at something a bit faster than the 7600 GT I was originally thinking of, initially I started looking at 8600GTs but soon noticed that the 7800-7950s where nearly as good and going on ebay for considerably less. What kind of performance gap is there between a 7600GT and the higher 7000 cards? Is going for a top DX9 card sensible or will a 7600GT play exactly the same games with a pretty similar experience until I have to upgrade to DX10 anyway for half the price?

7600GT is about half the speed of a 7900.

The 79x0's (Not the 7800's) are actually a little quicker than an 8600GTS, but i'd still get the 8600GTS over them for DX10.

The 7950 isn't worth it - it's a 7900GT with more voltage and higher clocks, both of which you could do yourself.

If only 7900GTO's were easy to find...

With your current build your GFX is the limiting factor.

I've done a bit more looking on ebay for graphics cards. I'm still tempted by one of the high 7000s but it seems that paying £100 for a graphics card that will probably ultimately be replaced with a DX10 card some day isn't really worth it on my budget. Equally given that it doesn't actually out perform the 7600GT by any significant margin on the Tom's Hardware guide benchmarks and the current insignificance of DX10 make it seem silly to pay twice as much for a card that won't offer any real world advantage.

So I think I've narrowed it down to either a 7600GT (£35-40) or one of the high 6800s (looking through finished items there are several that have gone for under £10 delivered).

I know a 6800s is a bit of a step down and probably looks a bit silly next to the rest of that system, but so long as it can produce reasonable performance on my current requirements of it (that aren't very taxing) and it leaves me £30 better off with more room for an upgrade.

The 6800GS/GT/Ultra seem to appear next to each other, just bellow the 7600GT on the graphics card rankings and the GT doesn't seem to show too much difference to the 7600GT on the Toms Hardware charts, only the standard 6800 seems to actually be significantly worse than the others. One thing I'm seeing a lot of on ebay (but can't find in the charts) is the 6800XT, how does it compare?

My requirements are really to be able to play the following games with reasonable FPS on high settings @1024x768 w/o AA and DX9 (where applicable).

LFS, RBR, rF/GTR/RACE, IL2, BF2 and Half Life 2.

Is it reasonable to expect this type of performance from this system with a 6800GS/GT/XT? I'm really not sure what kind of performance I want to aim for in the short run given that it's going to be a huge improvement whatever I go for and I don't currently have an appetite for graphically intensive games.

EDIT - just realised that the XT is a limited version of the card that was so far down the rankings I didn't spot it. There are still a few 6800GTs that have gone for around the £20 mark, which still leaves them worth considering.

Another thing I've been looking at are cases, Aria seem to have a nice range of cases for less than the Akasa Zen most of which come with a PSU, would a bundled (520W) PSU be sufficient for this system? I could always rip it out and replace it if needed still with an overall saving. If I'm trying to save it just seems silly to be spending £55 (ex VAT) rather than £15-20 (ex VAT) if the Aria case would do.

Damn, don'tcha just hate those gits with loadsa money 92 fricking quid !!

I'll pm that other one i had my eye on if you want, i think i'll pass on it myself, really need to get a new PSU and heatsink first.

Yeah please if you wouldn't mind

The Zen is a nice case but the PSU's bundled with all cases are TERRIBLE.

In ATi terms the XT (and the XTX) are the VERY best - in nVidia terms they are second worse (to the LE, aka Lame Edition).

Quote from Jakg :

The Zen is a nice case but the PSU's bundled with all cases are TERRIBLE.

But what is the actual likely effect of having a bad PSU on a not terribly power hungry system? I'm currently using a cheap nasty 250W PSU and my computer isn't randomly crashing all the time so is it really necessary to spend more than twice as much in the case/PSU if a basic one would be adequate?

Poor PSU can cause instability and kill components.

Your system might not be power hungry, but that just means you don't need to buy huge PSU, just a decent quality one.

I've been in the situation where i "saved" £20 on getting an "Ultra 550w!!111!!!" and it not only burnt out but also took an £80 mobo with it, inside of a day. I then had to go and get a decent PSU as WELL as a new mobo.

I've now "saved" over £20 thanks to it, as the PSU has supported me from single to Quad core, and from 6600GT's to an 8800GTX (don't ask)

In that case then I'll go for a decent PSU, the 500W OcUK one you recommended me seems like one of the cheapest around although ebuyer seems to have a large selection for considerably less, is there some way of telling how good they are other than the indicated wattage? Also how much higher is the power requirement for new graphics cards?

Unless there's any functional advantage I'll probably still go for an Aria case, even if it means stripping out the PSU (would it have any resale value on ebay?) rather than paying twice as much for the Akasa.

A little bit of progress

I've bought the first part of my new computer (exhibt A)

Anyway on a slightly more serious note I've been wondering about motherboards, do many have built in wireless? It would be more convinent than getting a seperate card but given the price they go for on ebay I don't think it would be worth it unless there was one within £5 of the i650.

Quote from ajp71 :

A little bit of progress

I've bought the first part of my new computer (exhibt A)

Anyway on a slightly more serious note I've been wondering about motherboards, do many have built in wireless? It would be more convinent than getting a seperate card but given the price they go for on ebay I don't think it would be worth it unless there was one within £5 of the i650.

dude it's white.........

Quote from Dru :

dude it's white.........

The Zen case I want is white

Most don't have inbuilt wireless, specifically ASUS high end ones do (with the "WiFi" suffix") and i think the Fata1ity ones might.

Done a bit more looking, nice to see the E6550 has dropped £11 since I started this search

Anyway I'm a bit confused about RAM, one of the good brands mentioned earlier was GeIL, on OC they appear to have 3 identical 2 x 1gb RAM packages, just at different prices and strangest of all the value package is the most expensive. Could someone please shed some light onto what the difference is for me?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... p;subid=813&mfrid=152