On Point 3 and 4 i'd go for...

Screen's



As They Are used by many members of DVF which sleep with them at night and do nutting but praise them



Same as the TFT's Great Screens from review's i've read and from ownners

Case's



Again Great reviews and silent case i was gonna get one of these but then i remmba i have none of that paper stuff oh whats the name of it oh yeah money



Great Reviews and a few peeps i know have these cases, really cool cases and also keep thinks cool if u understand that

Thats my veiw on things hope me has helped

Been looking through some graphics cards, are these any good and will they last for a while?

Asus ATI Radeon 9600SE/TD 128MB
Asus V9560TD GeForce FX 5600 256MB

Cheers

Chris

Get a 9500 pro and unlock it, will save you a hundred. Power supply wise? Get something with a lot of kick 350 or a 400 (depends if your overclocking, I recommend you do however since again, your saving your friend money).

If you are building a complete PC it is actually alot easier and cheaper to get a ready built one.

Try Carrera or Evesham

if you price up the components they use (all good btw) yourself you will never beat the price.


Carrera do an all singing all dancing AMD2500XP 512Mb Radeon 9600 17" TFT 6 channel Audio and surround sound speakers and you get 3 years On site warranty for 699 +VAT.

I just wouldn't bother with the hassle of building one for him.

Carrera are pretty good, I have a mate that works for them

Not bad prices but still expensive

ok im bored on lunch so here goes


Just as a benchmark, the last pc that I built was a


P4 2.6 (*or maybe 7) with Hyperthreading O/C to 3.2ghz (140)
450watt power (35 quid ish)
radeon 9700 pro (150quid)
180GB IBM Deskstar XP drive (100 quid)
1GB DDR PC3200 (100 quid)
Gigabyte Motherboard , something XP it is (70 quid)
AOpen CD Rom 52x burner (40 quid)
2nd hand Monitor (20quid )
Total cost 655 with vat.
All products sourced from www.computerorbit.co.uk - ebay and a local store for IDE cables etc.

and it performs extreemly well in benchmarks and applications.


Id have to say that I dont agree that its cheaper to buy than build.

You can go one step further by buying second hand parts from ebay, like your processor (intel anyway) cos they are guaranteed for 5 years with the manufacturer anyway. I have bought 1 dead processor before p4 1.7 and they replaced it with a 2.6 (or maybe 7) at no extra charge!!! (the old massive p4 chips are no longer made).

RE: Power supply 350 is fine, but if you plan to overclock a 450 is really the boy, but it will cost u an extra 30 quid.

Radeon 9500 is also a good card, but I dont think the life on it for the cutting edge games will be anymore than 1 year. Try a 9700 pro (a real one) second hand for around 120 ish, should last at least 20 months.

finally I can recommend Gigabyte boards, as they are DIRT cheap with good pound for pound performance.



Finally on this, I upgraded from Geforce3ti 40gb disk 526 RDRAM P41.7
and as of the moment, I have to honestly say that the difference in performance with games was probably not worth the upgrade. Im convinced that the majority of games are buggy as hell atm, cos Vietcong, Halo etc still run unreliably. Max Payne 2 runs like a dream though.

I can burn cds at the same time as playing games though, which is impressive I suppose. but ultimately pointless

Oh and finding a 9500 pro thats actually of the right architecture to PROPERLY mod to a 9700 is very difficult now. I searched for a long time before going for the 9700 pro, through failure.

I bought 3 9500 pro cards and none were of the right type (u need ones with L shaped memory and a specific hardware build).

AS soon as ATI learnt their mistake they pulled it :/

If you can get a 9500pro then do it, but despite what people may tell you dont take the 9500 instead of a pro card.

I give the 9500 pro a lifespan of around 12 months, at current rates.

check out www.omegacorner.com for news on modding and what u can and cannot achieve.