Replies

Thanks,more good solid info,posting to FR has probably saved me days of research,
soooo,one more question .You mentioned overclocking,
which way do you recommend,how difficult is it to do and how reliable has it been for you?

Overclocking your CPU simply means you get it to run faster than it's rated speed. I built my current set up for overclocking. I had a 300Mhz celeron and overclocked it to 500+Mghz. You accomplish this a number of ways including increasing the core voltage and or the speed of the front side bus. Overclocking is also possible on your video card.

It used to be a lot more usefull than it is now. I don't recommend it unless you want to fool around with it for entertainment sake. Or unless, like me, you are a die hard computer-hardware-geek-wannabe. If that's the case, overclocking your CPU is mandatory.

You mentioned overclocking, which way do you recommend,how difficult is it to do and how reliable has it been for you?

I use Asus mother boards, but the Abits also use what is called jumperless settings. You set the CPU clock and memory bus speeds through the bios. There's several newsgroups and web sites that specialise in how to do it. You can ask board specific questions, and get replies within hours. One such site is Overclockers.Com.

I've overclocked both Pentium and AMD chips, and the AMDs are by far the best performers. You can realise performance gains of 33% quite easily. I've had my T-bird 800 running at 1 GHz rock solid stable for over a year, and a 1 GHz T-bird running at 1.33 GHz for nine months.

The two biggest enemies in overclocking are heat (hence the need for a good heatsink/fan) and flakey cheap memory modules.

Finally, you'll need a good motherboard monitor. Most of the ones that come with the motherboard are inaccurate. MBM, which can be downloaded here, is probably the best. It's also free.

I concur with a poster above expressing reservations about cheap cases. But you don't have to overpay. One of the best cases is Inwin A500 which goes for less than $50.

Whenever I build a machine I go the the usual places like Anandtech.com, Tom's Hardware, motherboard.org, and then I also google on say "reviews computer cases" and other components. It's a lot of research work initially, but it really pays off. (Then of course you get to experience all those disappointments when you can't find anybody locally selling your first choice of a component.)