Quick and Dirty Spec Please?

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Hello guys.

What do you recommend?

CPU: Less than £100. Is it worth spending the extra £20 for an extra Mb of cache and .20 more Ghz between the E2180 and the E4500?

RAM: It all seems really cheap at the mo. 2Gb will suffice (what are the OCZ and Crucial sets like on DOTW?) Something around £40 - £60 if poss.

MOBO: This is where I'm struggling. There are so many to choose from. I am not fussed about overclocking really, so don't need all those features, and I don't need firewire or integrated wireless. What is the best for under £100?

GPU - Want a 8800GT. Just need to know if any particular brand is worth considering.

I think I have all the other bits and bobs I would need. I was tempted to just get the cheapest Conroe, cheapest 2Gb RAM set, cheapest mobo and cheapest 8800GT and be done with it, but thought I would sip from the fountain of knowledge that is the OCUk General Hardware forum first ;)

Thanks for any input.
 
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Great spec BillytheImpaler! Don't think I could have made that any better myself. Only thing is you might want to get an aftermarket CPU cooler if you plan on clocking it, because that processor is a really good clocker. Hard drive size should be fine as well unless you're planning on keeping a lot of films on it or doing some serious video/sound editing.

Other than that I couldn't recommend any better
 
Great spec BillytheImpaler! Don't think I could have made that any better myself. Only thing is you might want to get an aftermarket CPU cooler if you plan on clocking it, because that processor is a really good clocker. Hard drive size should be fine as well unless you're planning on keeping a lot of films on it or doing some serious video/sound editing.

Other than that I couldn't recommend any better

I overclocked before with my Barton 2500 chip, and haven't really done it since. If I can overclock this one with minimal faffing then I will. But I can't be bothered with an aftermarket cooler and running prime95 tests for hours :p

Nothing against those that do it of course, what some people achieve is pretty amazing. I haven't got the patience!

EDIT: Also, I have some data on my windows drive in my current machine that I want to transfer over to the new one. If I install Windows fresh on the new HD, and then connect the old HD, what will happen? I mean, will the computer give me a choice of which drive I want to boot 'from'?

And finally, I presume that I can install XP SP2 on that HD without the need for a floppy disk?

Thanks :)
 
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No it won't give you an option unless it was present when you installed becasue at that point it writes its bootloader. If you just want to get data off of it you can simply connect it.

Correct, you will not need to load drivers.
 
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