Hey Morgy, firstly, Welcome to the forums.
Regarding your specification:
The OCZ StealthXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply is fine and if you are on a tight budget, than you can't really do any better than that particular PSU. Now if you are willing to stretch, than may I recommend the
Corsair HX 520W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU. One of the most recommended and talked about power supply’s everywhere I would imagine especially on this forum.
Concerning the Coolermaster Hyper TX 2 CPU Cooler, I haven’t heard much about that specific cooler but I will say, if you will be looking at overclocking the Q6600 in the future then that CPU cooler could well hold your overclock back due to the temperatures (Now i say this manily due to it only costing around the £15 mark) Once again, if you are willing to stretch then I would highly recommend the
Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler .
Going onto the memory. You could save £6 by going for the
OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2, pretty much exactly the same as the Geli but slightly cheaper.
The Nvidia 8800GT is a fine card, the only little thing i will raise to you is the manufacturer that you have chosen. In my opinion,
this card is worth the extra £5 for the extended warranty which is 10 years.
The very last thing I have to mention is regards to your Operating System choice. Is the reason why you are choosing Windows XP over Windows Vista. Is it because of the compatibility problems and just general problems you hear that some people are getting with Windows Vista?
First, when Windows Vista was first released their where a few problems with compatibility, however, this has now changed and the support for Windows Vista is now excellent. The majority of the manufacturers out their have now released 64-bit drivers for their hardware and as regards to software, once again, the majority of software now work perfectly fine under Windows Vista. Their have also been a few problems within Windows Vista but the majority of these are now fixed thanks to the Performance and Reliability packs that Microsoft have been releasing along with other updates. Now there are still a few problems around for example, slow transfer rates across networks, from one folder to another but this seems to be only affecting a few people and not the whole user base that is using Windows Vista. Though I believe this is set to be fully fixed in Service Pack 1 (Fiji) which is due out in the first quarter of next year.
Now as far as gaming performance goes, in my opinion, it is now exactly the same as Windows XP, I notice no slowdowns what so ever. Now I understand that some people are still having a few problems but I believe these are very far and few between these days and I feel that some people tend to over exaggerate things a tad.
Though please take into account this is under DirectX 9. Regarding DirectX 10 performance, going on most of the responses from others, it currently isn't up to scratch and is actually better to run it under DirectX 9 in some games. Now in my opinion this has nothing to do with Vista and DirectX 10 itself. DirectX 10 is implemented just fine and it is the hardware that needs to catch up a bit. I think their is a lot more to DirectX 10 then a few people think. If someone disagrees with me on this, please post and state your reason. I would be very interested in hearing other people’s views regarding this.
If you do happen to buy Windows Vista and run a game such as Crysis under DirectX 10, you may not be particularly happy with the playability of it. If this happens, you can always run the game in a DirectX 9 mode.
Take a look at
this article, interesting and well worth reading.
As a revised specification. (Just a possibility)
Since you are slightly worried about building your own system, then take at look at
this guide, may help you out a little.
