weEvil

Cool. What do you guys have to say about LCDs? I'm in the market for a high contrast LCD. Higher the better. Response time.... meh. Contrast and color reproduction is more crucial to me. Anything like a plasma monitor? They have fantastic contrast.

dx10 is completely useless for a workstation. Better alternative is to buy a 6600 or 7300 and use the remainder to buy extra ram. That will make more of a difference than a shiny new (and useless) dx10 card.

Know any good fanless or liquid cooled PSUs? I'm a noise whore.

Your card is 6 years old, its pretty much obsolete for Vista.

He wants an AGP because his current board is a Ti200. That's an AGP slot card. The GeForce 8600GT is as PCI-E card. Therefore, if he wants to replace just the videocard, another AGP one will work and not a PCI-E card. And Vista requires a DirecctX 9.0 Card for "features". Anything else is good for games. The DX10 cards are not used to make the system look better and shinnier than 9.0c, but rather to game. I'm guessing he has a workstation, and he wants to keep it that way. Except upgraded to look pretty with AERO. The 7300GT will deliver very well. Even a 6600GT wil deliver. But I figure the 7300GT is better since its based on DirectX 9.0c. The last revision. Therefore slightly more up-to-date than the latter (and the same price roughly). Vista needs 9.0c for all the features of Aero: http://www.web-articles.info/e/a/title/Aer...ments-in-Depth/ Oh yeah, and the 7300GT and the 6600GT do come in 256mb models for AGP. And well withing the budget of $100. And a much better alternative to the 7950GT from a price standpoint (7950GT is WAY mer than $100.) and a usability standpoint.(He's not going to be able to use a 7950GT anywhere near its potential with a Pentium D and the RAM and the motherboard he has.)

Well. I guess its back to the good old 400W PSU then. Good thing I don't need to spend money on the "higher end" models for absolutely no reason. Thanks.

No problem with you personally. Just how you approached the situation.

Pirates are the ones who distribute the content. They rip it, they distribute it.

Well your friend is obviously one of the 56% who don't have problems with it. Luck of the draw. Do you go to a casino because there is a 40% chance that you will win some money? Because your friend always wins, therefore you will win too. Right? The correct answer is: WRONG. Think for yourself and make decisions for yourself. Not because your "friend" said so. On a side note: What is a great PSU? I'm putting toghether a PC soon. 500W and dependable is what I'm looking for. Quiet too if that's possible. Can PSUs accept watercooling for even more quiet performance?

Oh yeah. Why not hook up a Jet Turbine to his PC while he's at it? Obviously it needs the cooling power too. On a more serious note: If you want a good videocard for Vista and some light 3D work here and there. A 7300GT will be nice. Its AGP. It passes all the Vista Tests as its DirectX9 Compatible, and its REALLY cheap. If you want to do some gaming and heavior stuff, get osmethung higher up. But for Vista and Just things like HD movie playback, a 7300GT is perfect.

Hmmmm. Interesting. This sweetens the deal. Especially since I'll get myself some really nice water cooling (I hate noisy fans with a passion). What about the e6600? Intel should drop prices again from what I read online. Also, how much life is there left in this socket? I don't want to go Intel and then in a few months find out that they are releasing their last chip and coming out with a new socket. I want a little bit of future proofing. Plus a 680i board is kind of pricey too. And how does the e6420 match with the GeForce 8800? I'd like my system to be VideoCard limited more than CPU. I like to squeeze every bit of life the cards have out of them.

I just can't bring myself to recommend the E4300 to anyone since it only has an 800MHz bus and 2MB cache. You can step all the way up to the E6420 with a 1066MHz bus/4MB cache and still be under $200US. On to recommendations... The reviews of the lower GeForce8 series cards aren't looking to good right now. If you're going for a GeForce8 card but don't want to spend a lot of cash on the high-end models then look at a 320MB version of the 8800GTS. Motherboards? Personally I have an Asus P5B-E and haven't had any problems at all with it. The only thing I didn't like about the specs was the onboard NIC so I turned it off and threw in an Intel PRO/1000 PT Desktop Adapter. It's PCIe x1 and runs between $35US and $40US from TigerDirect. I'm not using the onboard sound either (never do) so I can't really speak as to how good it is...but I haven't read anything bad about it). As far as a hard drive recommendation...look at the Seagate 7200.10 series. They're very quiet, very fast and super reliable. Cool. Thanks for that. How does it stack up to the AMD X2 6000+? I found one on eBay for about $200. Its the latest one for their AM2 socket. And yeah. I was just looking at the 8800GTS the other day. Its almost as good as an 8800GT but at half the price. And less memory... but that's not that important. I was tinking of buying it after nVidia releases the 8900 or when ATi lands their r600 monster turd. Whenever that is, since the GTS should lower in price even more. Also, I'm thinking to "future proof" this PC a bit. To allow expandability. I'm thinking of getting an SLi board so I can pop in another GTS (or three) whenever I need it or it gets cheap enough. How is the current socket looking for Intel? Many more processors good for it? Or are they moving up to a newer tech again? I see that the AMD AM2 socket is pretty much tapped out. The 6000+ is supposedly one of the last processors for it. What about the QUAD Platform that AMD keeps pushing. Is that the replacement for AM2? Again, I don't care about bleeding edge performance. I care about VALUE.

No, and I never plan to. I don't feel the need to buy hardware from a vendor who only has a 15% market share. At least with an Intel I don't ever have to worry about hardware or software support, ever. You don't need software support for it. Its an x86 processor. Just like Intel makes. You plug it in and it works. Windows covers a wide range of prcessors. AMDs work in Windows, Linux and even that hacked version of the Apple OS (even though it shouldn't). And sorry pal. I'm not thinking Core2Duo. I'm thinking MONEY. I don't have brand loyalty like you do. So far AMD and Intel seem to be in a price war. AMD is cutting prices to sell more. Intel is following suit. So far I want to see which has the best value for the money.

dbpoweramp. Free. Except you have to pay for MP3 encoding licence. You get a free trial for it though. Fantastic tool. I use it all the time. Converts plenty of other formats too with plugins. http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

I don't want the "cheapest" I want the one that has the most value. Bang for Buck. What about AMD? I heard they were slashing prices since Intel released the Core2 Duo.

I have tried to use fineprint on server 2003. Gives me some problems. Maybe its not compatible. Used the server version. Any alternatives? I like them small and light on the system. OpenSource and Freeware is good. If I have to pay, that's okay too.

Cool. Anything else? Like a budget CPU and videocard recommendation?

Yes, yes, and yes. Media center, ripping CDs and encoding, video encoding, video capture and storage... games too. That's why I'd like a GeForce 8. Or 7. Whichever has most fps per dollar. Also, same with CPU. I don't care what brand. Just want the most fps per dollar. If its a hot AMD processor, I don't care. I'm using water cooling anyway. More fps usually means better performance. Encoding, decoding and games.

Double post.

I am looking at a new PC. I don't want to spend too much, but I want the best performance to price ratio. I want a good processor. Mid range. Not the most expensive one as the price is inflated and its only a bit faster than the mid-range ones, but for triple the price. I've boon looking at the Core 2 Duo Processor. Thinking of Dual Core. Quad Core is overkill right now. What do yo guys reccomend? Also for a videocard I was looking at GeForce 8. Maybe an 8400 (does this exist?) or 8600. Gonna buy it after the ATi monster is released and nVidia drops prices. Also motherboards, what do you fellas recommend? Hard Drive 7200RPM with 500GB or so sounds just fine. Samsung if they have any. They have quieter ones from what I heard. Also RAM. I was reading that the Core 2 does pretty good with PC3200 ram. If you put something like PC5400 it has little performance difference. What's the sweet-spot for ram?

Never had a problem. Its even MORE stable than SP1 if that's possible for 2003.

If you want to do it the messy way, you can just install over it. Enterprise over Standard. However, you cannot change standard to Enterprise. Enterprise has a different system of licensing and activation than Standard. Trying to mess with it WILL result in it breaking and you getting locked out of the system. I know, I've done it. With the amount of time you spend trying to convert (useless to try unless you know the ins and outs of the system), you can make backups and do a fresh install of Enterprise. But I don't see why you want Enterprise, just mess around with the settings in standard. Its got almost all the features anyway. Also, don't forget to use nLite. You can integrate Server SP2 in the install CD so you don't have to fiddle with it later.

Cool. Thanks for the link. Exactly what I needed. Step-by-step with great detail.

Any super-light PDF printers? I've been looking at the one from Fineprint, but the trial gives me issues with 2003.

So far nothing has been released. Maybe it will be a legal application that will modify source files, like nLite or XPize.