Quote:
Originally posted by Jimmy4
I have another question, what is the difference between a normal Radeon, and a Sapphire Radeon?
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ATI and NVIDIA are chipset manufacturers. They make the actual processing unit on the videocard. ATI also makes the actual videocard, but NVIDIA does not. That's why you see AOpen GeForce, BFG GeForce, PNY GeForce, but never NVIDIA GeForce. ATI, on the other hand, does make videocards, so you'll actually see an ATI Radeon for sale.
My point? Sapphire is simply a company that buys the right to put ATI's chipset on their videocards. They buy the rights to a 9800 Pro, and call it the Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro.
Sapphire has always had a good reputation in the videocard industry. You can't go wrong with them.
If I were you, I would ditch the 9600XT and get a Radeon 9800 Pro for $200 USD instead. It'll be worth it, trust me.
Ditch the Athlon XP 2600+ and get the 2500+ instead. It has a slower clockspeed, but you'll see better performance and for a cheaper price due to the increase L cache. It also runs at 333 MHz FSB despite the lower clock speed.
The NF7 is a good motherboard, but make sure you get the NF7-S Revision 2.0. The NF7 and NF7-S are two different products. I have to stress that you want the NF7-S 2.0, not the regular NF7. I'm not sure if the NF7 even supports 400 MHz FSB.
The RAM looks good. I'd get at least 512 MB. 1 GB would make it very nice. Some games suffer with only 512 MB. The jump from 512 to 768 MB is bigger than you'd think. If you're planning on overclocking at all, get PC3200 instead. PC2700 runs at a nice 333 MHz, right at the FSB of your processor. Any overclocking and you'll need faster RAM.
I have a 40 GB hard drive and am nowhere near close to filling it up. I'd downsize it unless you're a "collector."
Other than that, it looks good!
The biggest advice I can give is to get the Radeon 9800 Pro for $200 instead of that 9600XT.
-Lasereth