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You couldn't sell that for $100. However, you COULD sell it for $200, and they'd sell in massive quantities. A 1GHz Pentium III is still quite snappy for everyday use. I know I would buy one. Also, the hand crank is a GREAT idea. Huge parts of the world have no central electricity. For...

Something's wrong when I have reason to sell my Socket 940 FX-53, a very solid performer. No one makes a decent Socket 940 PCIe motherboard. I'd have to sell my CPU (which is not worth as much as the performance would suggest), and replace it with a lesser Socket 939 CPU. That's bullshit...

Drop the Raptors. Add a good SCSI card and pick up four Seagate Cheetah 148GB 15,000RPM; put them in a RAID 10. Also, if you want to overclock, cut down to a pair of 1GB Ballistix modules, since you're always limited by the slowest stick you get, and there's no use for 4GB ram anyway.

You'll never get acceptable Doom 3 performance with a PCI video card. :( With a Radeon 8500, you *may* be able to run some older FPS games like UT2004, but Doom 3 is very demanding on a video card; the minimum to run it acceptably is a Radeon 9500, or maybe a GeForce Ti4600 or something...

www.lik-sang.com they're a little pricey, but it's as close as you'll get to reputable with this stuff. good place to get imports, too

Reminds me a little of 3dfx. :(

The X800XL and 6800GT are roughly even in performance. The X800XT performs substantially better than the other two due to increased clock speeds. I'm very happy with my All-in-Wonder X800XT.

Closed, for sure. Open PCI slots are dust magnets, and they detract from the general airflow of a case. If you need extra airflow for your graphics card, put a blowhole over it.

If you're really strapped for cash, a 3000+ is fine, too. Any Athlon64 can provide solid performance. Also, don't waste your cash on SLI. Cut back on the motherboard a little, and get a 6800nu, 6800GT, or an X800XL. SLI is really for people who want next-gen performance NOW, and it really...

It seems to me that the FEAR demo is poorly optimized, and full of memory issues. I'm running it on an A64 FX-53, 1GB of RAM, and an X800XT, and it stutters pretty badly above 1024x768. I'm sure that 2GB of RAM would help, but I really don't think it should be necessary with decently-tweaked...

Regardless, I think Pentium M is a major step in the right direction for Intel. All we need now is a fully-featured modern chipset for the Pentium M.

We was robbed. The initial buzz when P4 came out was that the architecture would stretch to 10GHz. The hype machine kicked into overdrive, and everyone picked up 1.5GHz P4s, just to learn they were slugs compared to their 1.26 and 1.4GHz Coppermine P3's. Pentium 4 was one miserable...

I wouldn't sink too much cash into AGP at this point. Go with a 6800nu or something inexpensive, then buy a new PC in a year or so, when Socket M2 and DDR2 become the standard.

I'm starting to think ATI's success was a flash in the pan; they've been milking one basic core design (R300) for 3 years now, and they can't come up with anything to beat nVidia. I guess they don't realize that making a lightning-fast card, which R520 is reported to be, does not matter if you...

Just out of curiosity, how do they determine if you fried it overclocking? It really looks like your 6600GT was toasted by a crappy power supply. Also, it is not prudent to overclock parts you can't replace. It is not prudent either to buy $150 cards for $250, but never mind that.

Going from a 2.8GHz P4 to a 4400+ is more than SOME speed improvement. The 4400+ is WAY faster in pretty much everything, and it may be more than you need to spend. I really think a 3500+ or 3700+ would do fine.

How about S754 only going to a 3700, and S939 going to FX-59, with 3+ GHz?

I can't see why they'd abandon AGP so quickly. It isn't hard to implement bridge chips, and there's no performance penalty for using AGP yet. I think that as long as people want high-end AGP graphics cards, they'll be available.

There's no such thing as a Radeon 9700 PCI. If someone sold you one, you got screwed.

Forgetting VESA Local Bus? :p PCI died slowly. All the chipset manufacturers wanted to get rid of it from the get-go, but high-end PCI cards were made for quite some time. For example, 3dfx was even working on a PCI Voodoo 6000, four years after AGP's inception. AGP will stick around...

eMachines are pretty reliable and well-made, from my experience. Their fastest right now could actually make a solid mid-range gaming rig with a beefier power supply and a good video card. It should be noted that it uses Socket 939 AND PCIe 16X. It doesn't have any one-lane PCIe slots, but...

They're pretty decent computers, but they cost way too much, and I think they're quite ugly looking. For a long time, I wanted an Alienware 7700m, until I realized the Sager 9860 was the same thing, except it wasn't butt-ugly, and it was a little cheaper.

I've heard nothing but horror stories about ibuypower. Also, if you're going to build your own, the best spot for price-performance is $1000-1500.

Just one question: I really enjoy some older games like Tomb Raider, Quake, and other Glide-based games. Would it be worthwhile to hunt down an old V5500-PCI or something like that? Is it better than using a Glide wrapper?

I don't care what crap they send our way, X800's and X850's are NOT outdated.

I seriously doubt they'll actually get any x800XT-PE refurbs, considering they never fully made it to market. They're called "Phantom Editions" for a reason. That said, they're a full 120MHz faster than the X800XL's.

I must say, I'd go with whichever's cheaper. Both are fantastic cards; you can't go wrong with either.

Didn't the last ACS heatsink perform really badly?

Timbuk2 makes some really fantastic laptop bags, but they're a little pricey. I paid $100 for a custom messenger bag from them, but I love it and it was definitely worth the cash.

If you think you have it bad, my Sager 9860 (P4 3.2GHz Prescott 640, Go 6800, 17" widescreen LCD, same thing as Alienware 7700m) gets about 90 minutes.

I see a hardcore gamer as someone who is really heavily into games. Hardware doesn't really play a part in this; the most hardcore (hardcorest?) guy I know uses an Athlon 64 3000 and a Radeon 9600Pro.

Don't get in the habit of financing everything. I have friends who do that, and some of them are six figures in debt. Also DO NOT USE INTEL if you want to play games, and if you do go intel, don't get the Extreme Edition; you're paying $400-500 extra for something like a 5% performance...

He could buy a slocket and get himself a 1.4GHz Socket 370 Pentium 3, which performs close to a 2GHz Pentium 4.

Imagine nVidia releasing a down-clocked 7800GTX, with cut-down memory bus, but still with all 24 pipes, for $200. That's what it was like back then, and the 9500 Pro is a very capable card. In fact, it blows the doors off a 9600XT.

Considering that most people still use AGP, I have a hard time believing that we won't see any next-gen cards supporting it, though if we do see some, they'll probably be more expensive than their PCI-E counterparts. I should also add that my X800XT runs Battlefield 2 quite nicely. I wouldn't...

It'll be a cold day in hell before a Radeon 9200 can run DirectX 9.0 decently. The 9550 should be a slight improvement, but don't expect new games to be playable above 800x600 or even 640x480.

Just a few days ago, my grandfather gave me his Optiplex GX1. Specs are as follows: Pentium 2 333MHz 128MB RAM Integrated Graphics (I put a GF MX4000 in it) Integrated Sound 40GB Hard Drive It recognizes my 40GB hard drive, so I'd imagine it'll take pretty much anything.

Try to avoid a 64-bit memory interface, as that will utterly kill performance.

Silence is something you DO NOT WANT in a keyboard. Spring ("clicky") keyboards are far more durable and they're easier to type on. I'd recommend finding an IBM Model M on eBay. You should be able to get a nice one for around $50. Make sure you get one of the PS/2 models, as you don't want...

You may be bottlenecked by your CPU; with a 7800GTX, I'd recommend a 3500+ or better. Also, 6,500 in 3dMARK 05 is pretty miserable for a 7800GTX. Put in a beefier CPU, and then you should be able to score close to 8,000.