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Old 03-16-2006, 06:13 AM   #12
Zink Whistlefly
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Join Date: March 20, 2005
Location: North Yorkshire, England
Age: 45
Posts: 520
As others have suggested, the Tagan 480W is a great PSU. However, I will still at least suggest that you look at the Hiper Type R PSU's - I've used 2 in 2 different systems and they really are stable, reliable, cheap and quiet. The Modular version (currently using in my main rig - 580W Type R) means you only need to connect the leads you will use which means less "spaghetti junction" with your wires, which means neater case, which means better airflow which means better temps, but either PSU will do nicely [img]smile.gif[/img]

The "FSB" on all of the latest A64 CPU's is 2GHz (which is HTT*5, although the HTT multiplier is set in the motherboards BIOS), so a 3700+ is 2.2GHz (11*200, 11 being the multiplier, 200 being the HTT (HyperTransport is literally just a number which determines how fast the FSB runs based on the HTT Multiplier - the actual frequency of the HTT has VERY LITTLE impact on performance with these A64's), so 200*5 is where the 2GHz comes from. The frequency of the FSB should never exceed 2000MHz, so if you were to overclock, and raise your HTT speed to 250 (giving you 250*11=2750MHz for example), you would need to lower the HTT multiplier to *4 to keep the FSB at 2GHz.

The 3700+ San Diego is a nice chip, and a good choice. The jump to 1MB cache is easily worth the extra cache.

Since you're running at stock speeds, any nforce 4 board will do you just fine, and ASUS boards tend to be packed with features.

The X800GTO is an excellent budget card. It uses the same core as the X850XT with 4 pipelines disabled and lower clocks, but still has colossal amounts of memory bandwidth. It's a good choice for the money. The link you sent me lists it in the $170-$200 range though, and for that money you could get an Nvidia 6800GS which will be the better choice by a long way

As for UK prices, www.cclonline.com and www.microdirect.co.uk are 2 retailers worth checking out. I also recommend www.cpucity.co.uk who really do look after their customers. Just stay away from Overclockers UK since they have pissed off a lot of people.
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