Fook, well I know thats good but my price range is about £400 if possible...

I'll most likely be asking my local small computer shop to build me one with me obviously handing them the specs I'm looking for.

You mention a 640mb gts but what games would need a 640? would a 320 run most things great for the next 3 years or so you reckon?

By the way I've kind of budgeted if I can afford it and I think it'd be fine with another 3k student loan + my weekend job helping out........therefore, I can now start building a NEW PC LIST, Woop! rock:

640 mb works better for higher res textures, can't remember who but someone on here asked me a while back about a demo not letting him use high res textures, at the time i had a 640mb gts and he had a 320mb gts and the ram was the limiting factor.

Cheers, well I guess I'll try for the 640mb then.

I'm clueless on the rest though....but heres what I need:

dual core processor
2 gigs of ram
250 gig hard drive

Quite recently my mate gave them a rough list like above and they found and built him his new pc. Hopefully they won't wack the prices right up.......he bought a dual core 3ghz machine with 2 gig ram, 150 gig hard drive and an Ati x1650 and they charged him about £400.

Surely if I got a 640mb gts they'd charge a lot more...........hmm, decisions decisions.
I don't fully trust myself to do it myself and I'd rather have some kind of warranty/people on hand who can fix it if it truly goes tits up.

If they try to give you an x1650 kick them in the nuts then point and laugh.

Maybe try buying the gfx card then get them to assemble the rest of the machine and install it? Make sure they'll do that first though.

ah its ok, he asked for that ati card.

is 3ghz dual core decent then? i currently run a P4 3ghz, what difference does Dual Core actually do??

[quote="mr.miyagi":8d013]ah its ok, he asked for that ati card.

is 3ghz dual core decent then? i currently run a P4 3ghz, what difference does Dual Core actually do??[/quote:8d013]

Dual core really just makes things more responsive. if you have a dual core enabled game you will see improvements in framerate etc. When you're playing a game on windows your one core cpu is handling background tasks as you play the game as well as running the game for you, with multiple cores theres more cpu time to allocate towards games that support more than one cpu, plus run all the background tasks that exist when you're playing the game.

Its basically more number crunching power, you can run a virus scan while playing a game and the game will play much better than if you were using a single core cpu. Everything just feels snappier with dual and quad cores.

Wicked, well are most games fine to run on dual-core now? I read all new games are I think. Think dual core is worth the upgrade tho?

Will I see much difference from my current setup? coz £400 is quite a price to spend for minimal change. You got dual core at the mo gerv?

[quote="mr.miyagi":1f38e]Wicked, well are most games fine to run on dual-core now? I read all new games are I think. Think dual core is worth the upgrade tho?

Will I see much difference from my current setup? coz £400 is quite a price to spend for minimal change. You got dual core at the mo gerv?[/quote:1f38e]


If you're getting a 3ghz core 2 with an 8800gts you'll see a massive difference over an x800. Crank up the detail in the majority of games and have great frame rates.


At the moment im running a core 2 quad, 2.4 @ 3ghz. happy:

Another thing, if I was to get Vista with it, will vista make use of the dual core cpu and is dual core 64bit?

You running Vista atm gervle? Not sure if I wanna risk using vista when xp runs ok. May be a good thing to get Vista now though.....

oh i have a question about vista as well since were on the topic. Its 150 for Home Premium right? Also can u upgrade if you dont have a authentic version of XP? And is it better to get 32 or 64 bit?

thank you india!

Im running 64 bit vista, for me most things run fine but different people have different experiences with it. 64 is better as it can address more ram, if you put 4 gigs into vista 32 it only makes use of 3-ish gig.

Not sure about upgrading a pirated version of xp though, probably better finding an oem version of vista which goes for a lot cheaper than full retail.

oem just comes with the cd? whats the benefit of full retail version?

Oems for installation on one pc, full version you can tranfer it between pc's but can still only be on one at any time. Still easy enough to ring ms and bs them to get the oem reactivated though.

yeah just get oem. you don't get 30 days of ms support with oem and you don't get a nice looking box. boo hoo.