AGP cards.

[Snee]

Yup, it is slower on the sapphire I've been looking at, the reason I still wanted 256Mb is that I thought it might make it a bit more future-proof as I assume more and more games will need as much dedicated ram as DOOM 3 does.

So I've been checking out D3 benchmarks, for that reason.

And the fact that it's slower might help to keep the temps down too, maybe.

Decisions decisions.

[Peerzy]

To be honest if you want to future-proof your card go for the 6600, in comparision the 9600 i gonna be rather shyte. The 6600 is part of a new generation of cards. It has all the features that will be needed by games within the next 3-5 years. The 9600 is starting to become very out of data right now so after a year or 2 your gonna find yourself looking and new graphics cards. Also the price difference isnt that much.

Also why teh 3hdd's? Can you not get 2 larger hdd's? By the way while were on the subject how do i add a third hdd my IDE cable only has two connectors

[Snee]

Don't you have two IDE connectors on the mobo? I guess if you are all out, you'll have to go for a controller card.

The three hds go with the ViVo really, so I can record all I want.
Not to mention that I can collect a lot of movies and music with like 3x300GB if I can get hold of the money. I wanna' leave my options open for three hds anyway, just in case.

I'm trying to balance my demands for a cool card with reasonable longevity, dunno' quite what i want the most, as I can't be sure where I'll be in a year or so from now.

Maybe I'll be building something with pci-e, which means that I won't be using that card in my new setup anyway.

[Peerzy]

Ahhh yesh if you only have 1 cd/dvd drive you can have 3 hard drives.

Try to build something so that when you want to movie to PCI-E you can use all the same parts (Ram, CPU, CD/DVD, HDD, PSU, Soundcard) and just have to change the mobo and graphics card. This means you can have the best system right now and make a quick cost effective upgrade in the next year or so to PCI-E.

[Snee]

I'm thinking that I'll be going with another shuttle then, so that means that all the extras I'll be buying for that one are ram, sata hds, processor and gfx card. That's the idea anyway.