New comp ideas

[Geezer57]

Which operating system for games? WinXP Home or pro (sp2)

Either XP Home or XP Pro should be fine for modern games, there really shouldn't be any difference. That said, however, I've been using Pro for years, without issue.

Why does AMD perform better than intel even although the clock frequencies are lower? how do i check if my AMD processor is sufficient for future games. Because on the boxes it just states Processor 2Ghz Required etc and AMD clock frequencies are way lower than Intel(It seems the AMD 64-Bit Dual Core X2 4200+ has a clock frequency of 2.2Ghz yet preforms better than Intel 3.4Ghz)

That's the result of processor efficiency, or IPC (Instructions Per Clock) - being able to do more work per clock cycle, in other words. Back in the days of the Pentium III vs. AMD Athlon wars, Intel found itself losing the battle - their architecture was second in reaching the 1Ghz "barrier", and had lower headroom. Their first issue of the 1066Mhz P3 processors had to be withdrawn, when enthusiast sites found them returning errors with certain math operations and reported the findings publicly. Intel had major egg-on-the-face syndrome at that moment. The people at the top decided that wasn't going to happen again, and made a major push for an architechture that emphasized speed over efficiency - lowering IPC for the first time ever in a new Intel processor series. Thus the Pentium 4 was born, and it really wasn't very pretty. The first series of P4's had trouble exceeding the later P3's, which really wasn't sorted out until the Northwood cores came out. They competed fairly well with the AMD Athlon XP's, with both sides swapping the "lead" for bragging rights. But when AMD introduced the Athlon 64, Intel's P4's were pretty much stuck in 2nd place. And there is where they've been for a while now, at least for the desktop enthusiast crowd, until just recently - when the Coroe core Core 2 Duo processors (now that's a mouthfull, isn't it?) were released! Now Intel is solidly wearing the performance crown, and they did it with lower-speed, lower-power, and higher efficiency. Their decision to de-emphasize IPC and focus on megahertz has proven to be a major wrong turn, one they've fortunately learned from.

Does the hard drive of 10000rpm matter for playing games? or can i save notes by selecting the 7200rpm one?

For games, there will be virtually no difference between a moderately priced 7200 rpm drive and a high-dollar 10K one. The only very minor benefit will occur in initial load time (and maybe occasional game-level loads, if the game requires loading new levels), during gameplay it's doubtful you'd see any difference. This is more about bragging rights for gamers, than any real-world performance benefit. Not to say these drives don't have their niche (they very much do), just that it's not in your ordinary consumer desktop.

How much of a difference does the DDR800 ram make over the DDR667?

Again, very minor possible improvements, where you have a system that is pushed to the edge. Normally, far better to buy more lower-speed RAM than less of the hi-zoot stuff. Without artificial benchmarks, the user would never see any difference.

should i look to get 512 MB card or stick with the 256Mb?

While 512Mb is almost essential if you're playing at extremely high resolutions, if your monitor doesn't support those top resolutions, 256Mb will do fine. I'd try to squeeze a few extra shekels out of the budget and opt for a card with a better core than the 7600GT you're considering. For not too much more money, you might look at a 7900GS, an x1800GT/GTO2, or even an x1900GT. The GPU core power is more important for high frame rates at low/medium/high resolutions than RAM, only at very high resolutions does RAM become a big factor. But manufacturers market their wares with numbers that "Joe Consumer" understands, and bigger RAM numbers must mean more performance, right? So you'll often see cards, like your 7600GT, offered with 512Mb of RAM - but that core will start to run out of steam before the extra RAM can prove to be beneficial. After all, it takes lots and lots of GPU horsepower to manipulate all those textures, when you're manipulating 1920 x 1280 (or more) worth of data. See an excellent comparo between the 7900GS and x1900XT 256Mb cards here: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2012501,00.asp

On another note: while your AM2 socket Athlon 64 is still a good choice (and was a great choice a few weeks ago), it really looks like the Conroe cores are the way to go right now, even in a fairly modestly priced machine. Here's a good article over at Anandtech outlining just such a budget system: http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2830&p=1

P.S. TechReport has a good article on the new GeForce 7950GT, which they contrast with the Radeon 1900XT 256Mb and other cards. See here: http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q3...t/index.x?pg=1