Of all the pieces that is what I was debating on the most.
I used http://www.techspot.com/review/164-radeon-4890-vs-geforce-gtx275/ to review all the cards and it seemed for $300 (extra $50 on the GTX275s I could get what appeared to be a different card. If you could do it over again what Vid card would you go with Sammy?
Also the Zalman looked like it had good reviews and some of the best cooling - I was hoping to get it for $54 on zipzoomfly but they are out of stock. If you could recommend a different one what would it be - there is always returns - JK
Probably won't change now cause I hit the price range I had to stay in.
BTW I heard that win xp only supports up to 3.25 gb. I know its a little too late but just thought you'd like to know. It's definitely ready anytime you go to win vista/7
"Our species is intelligent enough to create the ability to do something, and socially handicapped enough to prevent ourselves from ever actually attempting it."
ASUS P5LD2-VM Motherboard
Intel Pentium D 3.2 GHz dual core OC 3.38GHz(5%) w/ Zalman heatsink and fan
5 fans total
3 GB dual channel RAM @ 667mhz
1 DVDRW drive (IDE)
Saphire ATI Radeon HD 4650 512 mb PCIe 2.0 16x (OC 630MHz CPU, 715MHz memory)
4 HDDs (320 GB SATA WD caviar blue w/ Win 7 Ultimate, 250 GB PATA Seagate, 1 TB WD Caviar Black, and 80GB WD Caviar SE)
BFG tech ATX 12V 2.2 550 watt modular PSU
madbone: The best Zalman coolers cool scarcely better than Arctic's Freezer 7 Pro, which is a little quieter (and makes a much nicer noise) and costs half as much. It is also smaller, simpler to install and lighter.
For the GPU, the GTX285 is indeed faster than the GTX275 and HD4890, but a GTX285 is at least $320, a GTX275 is $250 and about 5-10% slower at best, and the HD4890 is cheaper still, at $230.
j24: 3.5GB with a 512MB GPU, 3.25 with something bigger, but generally, something will suffer regardless. Unless you regularly need 3GB+ of RAM there's little need to use Vista as VIsta typically uses 1GB more RAM than XP for the same applications, which of course negates its 64-bit abilities with 4GB of RAM.
