That depends on how often you intend to upgrade your CPU. The 3200+ will last you about a year but if you intend to run a CPU for 18 months to 2 years then you'd be better off getting a 3700+ San Diego or even a 4000+ San Diego. These are single-core CPU's, dual-cores still have too many issues...
More CPU's are produced for the Socket 939 architecture than there are for any other PC platform and that applies to both sheer numbers and widest range of models. The last time such a broad industry acceptance for a specific socket occurred was with the Socket A which lasted a decade. DDR2...
He he he I almost did that myself but seeing how buggy the 7900GT turned out to be I'm glad I didn't. I would have preferred a 7800GT but the few I found were way too expensive so I settled for keeping my AGP board for another year and bought the BFG 7800 GS OC. It's very expensive but turned...
The chipset drivers on the Asus site are always outdated, as they are on most motherboard manufacturers' website. You can get the latest ones from VIA itself:
VIA chipset drivers download
Mark as far as I know the Digidice uses the Enhance ENP-2320 PSU (Pinchy could confirm).
Dimensions, pic and specs:
Enhance ENP-2320
It looks like the typical horizontal case desktop PSU's that were common back in the 1990's. Those are indeed quite expensive nowadays. This particular...
It's easy to determine a PSU's actual wattage as long as you know the amperage on the 12v rail. Just multiply amperage by 12. Formula:
amperes*volts=watts
This will give you the average output in watts. Only high quality PSU manufacturers rate their PSU's with the *real* values, most...
Yup, you don't really have a choice I reckon. The only card among the 4 you mentioned that would provide a significant boost over your X800XT PE is the 7800 GS, and that's at stock speed (7800 GS is one of the most massively overclockable cards around).There are cheaper 7800 GS's than the BFG...
In theory that's true but the actual real-life bandwidth limit on DDR2 before it started to overheat was barely above that of DDR, max value varies with sources but it's rarely above 700Mhz. As for DDR3 the initial 2Ghz hype has been toned down to "above 600Mhz" which I guess means there's a...
GDDR2 was simply the same as DDR (or GDDR, the "G" simply means the ram is being used on a graphics card) but without certain DDR protocols that had become obsolete. Because it required less calculations (iterations) in data processing it was slightly faster (at least in theory) than DDR but...
The X300 is a very basic entry-level card with very tiny caps, it's designed for office applications rather than gaming. I don't think it could take much of an overclcock so it's quite possible that it simply won't allow you any headroom.
At stock speeds the X1800 XT 512 is said to be a good contender to the 7900 GT.
Not nearly as good as the 7900 GT with a decent cooler, and that's the reason why it's usually the X1900's that are compared with the 7900's.
Actually he could even keep his X850CF and add another one if he has a CF motherboard. 2 X850CF's should come very close to one X1900 XT, minus a few esoteric gizmos.