Bleh. Here it's called GST - Government Service Tax. It's 12.5%

Anyway - go with radeon for gfx, athlon for cpu and you'll be sweet. Meh.

i think i'll have to stick with the geforce 4 for a while, a radeon 9700 pro is still pretty expensive.

the HD issue is also annoying, i wasn't given an xp disk when i brought the pc, so if i either keep the current small crappy one (and have to format because of the mobo) or get a new HD, i'm gonna have to pay £160 for a copy of xp!!!

Check your PM BJ.

As for the gfx card...yeah the 9700pro is a bit expensive still, but make sure you throw out that geforce when you get the chance, geforce is SERIOUSLY losing territory on Ati lately. And frauding benchmarks to make it seem like they aren't.

Check these benchmarks out:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20 ... fe-03.html


My 9600 pro card kicks the crap out of all but one Nvidia card... and the 9800pro wipes them totally of the charts.

Ofcourse, these benchmarks aren't the same for every game and it's dependent on good drivers; but it's still an indication nvidia isn't doing too well lately, when combined with the fraudulace benchmarks some time ago.




Blah..you could ofcourse wait for the next generation of gfx cards to appear, which won't be long away anymore.


And the tax thing; yeah, american government taxes extremely low on electronics. Lucky bitches. American fast internet is much better too in terms of speed/price, than our european ones. But that has to do with providers in europe not uncapping the full possibilities of the lines here (yet), in order to make more profit out of it. Cos technically we got equally fast lines, and also less distance to cover, greater population density etc.

yeah, ati rule. i don't know whether the 9700 pro has been discontinued but they seem to be a bit tough to find over here at the moment. very strange.

my geforce 4 is also only a 64mb version, so with hl2, etc coming soon, i really need to change things.

ati cards seem to be much better where anti aliasing is concerned, much faster than nvidea.