also if you have any bumbs in the road while building ur comp do some googling (google is your best friend) and come here and do some posting will help you step by step
well that S&H is to Houston, Texas and he lives in Arkansas so i figure he will be about the same give or take
The guts and and the OS (say XP Home), yeah, $1000 could do it. Let's see what I can come up with off Newegg. Motherboard: Asus A8N-E --$115 CPU: Athlon 64 3000+ Retail --$139 RAM: Corsair XMS 1GB dual-channel kit (2x512MB) --$114 Video Card: Sapphire Radeon X800Pro --$199 Hard Drive: Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM ATA100 --$98 Optical Drive: Pioneer DVR-110BK 16X DVD+/-R --$41.99 Power Supply: Enermax 535W EG565P-VE --$88.99 Case: Antec SLK3000-B --$49 OS: Windows XP Home SP2 --$91.95 Total: $936.93 + Shipping (and Taxes for those in CA or NJ---Newegg has warehouses there) Of course, if you want to fit a monitor in that budget, that's pushing it. I included a case, but that's optional. If you do drop the case out of the budget, then you might want to put that toward an Athlon 64 3200+, which is $159.00 at Newegg.
heres an article on the x800 GTO2 and it shows the performance increases once you mod it to an x850. http://www.neoseeker.com/resourcelink.html?rid=104094 to give you an idea of how good this comp will be i was looking around in the sapphire forums, and i found someone who had this card modded, with a amd 3200, and a gig of ram that was slower than that crucial ballistix i suggested, and he got a 6100 in 3dmard 05, so expect something higher, and might i add that is a little more than a 1000 better than mine, and i run can run games like BF2 on max settings and still get great FPS, so expect to some good performance with that modded GTO2
6100 for a modded gto is good, as an x850xtpe only gets 6300 or so in 3d mark 05. so a modded x800GTO2 to an X850XTPE is nothing more than an X850XTPE and wont gain any performance over it, in some benchmarks there is evident of it getting more than the x850xtpe. so, its worth getting the X800GTO2, might not perform just as good as an X850XTPE its almost as good, no point wasting extra money on an X850XT PE just for that little extra performance.
and because the GTO2 is built with the same core as teh x850s its not putting too much stress on the card.
i feel the same way, i am so temped to sell my card and buy that or a 7800GT, they have gone down so much in price over hear, you can get one overclocked from EVGA 460/1100 for just $340(roughly 192 pounds) over at newegg
yea, i feel that i need new graphics card, but at moment i cant afford to, so for christmas i get new processor, hopefully amd 3500+ or 3800+, and new motherboard, still agp, unless there is a decent motherboard that has agp and pci express on, but if there isnt, i will get a decent agp motherboard that will overclock my cpu and do other good stuff. i hope the full power of my graphics card will be unleashed with an AMD 3500+ processor.
I wouldn't recommend the ASRock Dual SATAII if you're concidering PCIe and AGP both. It's got the worst manual of all time, they put so many languages in there was no room for useful content. Nothing on the BIOS features and it didn't explain what the abbreviations meant or how to configure the front panel switches It was also very cramped and didn't support SATA hot swap (oh well). And the sticker over the AGP slot was glued on so when I went ot peel it off it left a whole sheet of paper fibers ontop of the adheasive, not good. But I guess for a budget build for someone experienced it would be alright.
