I work part-time whilst at uni and my work had an electrical fire in one of the departments (only small), we had all the computers replaced due to "smoke damage". Out of 12 computers, most were damaged (mainly due to the PSU).. They were all been chucked into a skip so i had alook over em and took two HP DC7700 atx baseunits.. I brought a new PSU (a 600W Modular Tagan), a few CMOS Batteries and from the two baseunits managed to make a working machine: Intel Pentium Dual Core 3.4GHz (2 x 3.4Ghz) 2048MB Crucial DDR2 667Mhz 2x 160GB Seagate SATA2 HD LiteOn 16X DVD-RW Floppy Drive 5in1 Card Reader PCI-e 16x motherboard Nvidia FX5200 256MB PCI graphics has onboard sound/video/lan, stuck Windows XP Pro SP2 on, runs like a dream and VERY quietly, lightning fast! I just need a monitor/graphics card and i'm away, not in a rush as limited cash, i wanna play COD4, it says recommended: X1800 or 7800GS I don't have a huge amount of cash, which is better X1950GT or 7800GS? the ati is alot cheaper..
The X1950 would be a little faster. If you want to stick with nVidia, the 7900GS is around $120 USD or so, and the 8600GT and GTS fall around the same price range. For reference, the 7900GS is roughly comparable to the 7800GTX.
