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Hey! No one cares! But I\'ve built a new PC, and I\'m gonna show off anyway. I won\'t claim it\'s top of the line, but it\'s a pretty decent blend of performance vs price I think. Well, it takes Command and Conquer 3 with maxed out settings smoothly, as well as Oblivion with all sliders up, 8x antialising, 1280x1024, etc, etc. Basically if there\'s a setting I could max out, I did, and the game still plays smoothly, even with the complex kavatch combat scenes, and the final combat scenes of the main quest! So what\'s in it?

Lets start off with the case : Coolmaster Cavalier 3 (Silver)



Screwless design, loads of room, 3 fans and an internal nozzle that fits just over the CPU fan so it draws air from the outside rather than from around the motherboard. It\'s solid metal, no plastic at all, part from the screwless slide and lock drive bays. It has side mounted USB, Firewire and sound jacks on either side. It\'s heavy metal door swings open to reveal my DVD drives. Lovely brushed metal texturing to it. Simple cool blue LED\'s for power, nothing else. Very elegant and not over the top with see through windows and lots of lights. It\'s quite a heavy case, which helps reduce vibration from fans a little. It comes with 1 large fan attached to the back of the case, and one smaller fan attached to the front of the HDD drive bays.

Next the PSU: (DabsValue 650W PSU Black 12cm SATA PFC)



I took a bit of a risk here and went for dabs cheap 650W PSU. I\'d glad I did, it was the cheapest of the rating, and powers everything very well.

The motherboard: (Asus M2N Deluxe 570SLI)

[img]http://www.dabs.com/images/product/uni2/43/4384_large.jpg[img]

I plugged it in, and Vista Premium picked up everything flawlessly. Two PCI-E x16 slots and 4 PCI slots. Lots of upgrade potential there! Plus a passively copper pipeline cooled chipset helps reduce the noise a bit, while offering the advantages of cooling. It came with WinDVD Authoring Suite, an impressive HQ stereo microphone. It supports duel core and FX processors, as well as DDRII RAM up too PC6400. Also includes an Intel 7.1 HQ chipset which records and plays 24-bit audio as standard. It\'s not absolutely the bee\'s knees, but realistically the only better chipsets are the 590SLI and the 680i, but of which are dramatically more expensive.

The CPU is an AMD 64-bit 3800+ Duel core. Again not the best, but a good balance of speed and price. (scores 4.8 on vista)

Crucial 2x1GB 240-Pin DIMM PC2-6400 Unbuffered Non-ECC CL4 which works well. (scores 5.9 on Vista)

Western Digital Caviar 250GB S300 8mb 7200rpm (Scores Vista 5.4) not the best, but it\'s pretty quick. With my 500Gb wireless hard disk drive working away as a server storing all my large files I didn\'t see the need for more.

LiteOn16x DVD+/-RW/RAM SATA black drive (they didn\'t have the sliver, still it\'s hidden behind the door) it came with PowerDVD and Nero 6.6 which isn\'t bad. Shame neither work very well with Vista! Still which Media Centre and built in burning, who cares?

The keyboard and mouse is Microsoft’s Wireless Desktop 4000, the same 2xAA battery\'s have lasted 4 days running, which is pretty good. I hear they work for three to four weeks in a single run.



The graphics card of course, is BFG Graphics GeForce 8800GTS OC 320MB GDDR3 PCIE Dual-Link DVI. It\'s rated 5.9 on both gaming and aero. It\'s not the standard reference model, but an overclocked version at 550Mhz and the RAM is set to 1300Mhz. Not the best, but again, for the price it\'s not bad.

Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1100, fully vista compliant, with DVB-T, analogue RF, FM Radio, S-Video, and composite sources. Works well with Windows Media Centre.

Finally the monitor! 19 Inch TFT screen 5ms.

Vista Score

CPU 4.8
RAM 5.9
Windows Aero 5.9
3D gaming 5.9
Disk data transfer rate 5.4

3DMark06
7070

Total Cost £913

where do u live? im going to kill u in ur sleep and steal it from u

and incase anyone takes me seriously and wants to noobslap me im just kidding about that

lol, you'd be in for a fight. I spent six months planning that system, and saving the cash I needed to buy it. Normally I don't spend more then £350 on a new machine.

* Slips dagger under pillow just in case *

Well thats the exact key board and mouse i have and well you heard right they usually last about usually 4 weeks.

edit: I cannot read

Ummm...


Personally I would've went the Intel way, but to each their own.



Wtf does it take to score a 10 in Vista?

I'll always wonder how people end up with phrases like:

and

Where do the backslashes come from? Is it a regional setting or something?

I too\\ wis\h to\\\ know this\?\\

I've seen it on some forums, where they parse any type of '' to add a \ I guess it's to stop it running any code, but I have no idea why someones post on this forum would.

I've found I got it when the forum thinks it has detected bad language or something else that will prevent a post.

It was cheaper than the intel comparision, and frankly I hate intel's numbering system. A 4000+ is faster than a 3800+ so I know which is better, and they are all athlon 64-bit's. Intels got Extremes, Duo's, Pentium D's, Celerons, and frankly it's easier to know where you are with AMD. Same with ATI vs nVidia, I usually go with whoever makes it clear what their product is, and how it compares to others from the same company.



I typed it out in word 2007, when I copy and pasted it into this window, for some weird reason it included alot of slashes. 2007 really is a pain in the ass. Alot of new features and automatic stuff, combined with no common sense what so ever!



Ratings above 6.0 don't exist. The max you can score is 5.9 or 6.0, not sure which. The idea is, that Microsoft release higher numbers as new technology hits the scene, then via live update and service patches, extra scores are added.