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I've decided on the 4600+. Which brands of the 7600GT are the better ones and which ones should I DEF stay away from? I don't know how much RAM I'll need. At the moment I have 1.5gb but its DDR PC3200 @ 200mhz. So would 1 gig of DDR2 PC4200 or 5600 suffice?

I DO play games like FEAR, Prey, Splinter Cell 3. My gf plays Sims 2.
 
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The first to consider on memory is what the board actually supports and the type of memory you can run even with a slightly faster speed. If your board runs only 184pin dimms that is the memory you are limited to. For running a faster dimm you would install that into the first dimm slot on the A channel with the slower on the first on the B. One thing to add here is that single sided dimms will be incompatible with dual sided dimms as well as having different memory timings.

As far as makes of cards many seem to prefer the XFX brand while I look at eVGA, BFG, MSI especially, and a few others. Since I have been running mainly cards with ATI chips lately someone else will have some other suggestions to throw your way there. With the games like Prey, Fear and it's expansion pack, Half Life 2, and some others I run those at high setting at the 1280x1024 screen resolution even in Vista with a lower end card. The MSI Radeon X1300 Pro 256mb PCI-Express isn't any high end model but does the job here. I look at reliability over performance mainly.
 
All OEM brands use the reference card design Nvidia provides them with. So other than the quality of the parts (and in some cases the core/mem speed) There really isn't much difference between different OEM cards. There is a difference in cust. support however; I hear consistently good feedback concerning evga, while the feedback on Xfx is alittle hit and miss. Evga also has their lifetime warranty (which allows you to change the HSF, no problem) and their Step-up plan, which is very useful if you want to upgrade in the future. So i give my vote to Evga, for their reliability and upgradability.
 
Ive been hearing similar commencs about eVGA being the better choice while I also have run MSI, Asus, and have taken good looks at the BFG brand as well. Buying OEM means you get the card and software disk alone in a more plain carton while retail gives you any cables, manuals, promotional materials, etc. for the most part That goes for just about any hardware bought OEM or simply bare bones.
 
I bought my parts today.
AMD 4600+
Asus M2N-E-SLI Motherboard
Asus EN7900GS GPU
2x1GB 667 Kingston RAM

I need to do a windows repair or reinstall don't I?
Also, I want to make sure I have the old ATI drivers etc uninstalled properly, any tips?
 
Often you can simply delete the current installation of Windows without a need to repartition the drive. You would first backup any files out the three main directories namely Windows, DocumentsandSettings\user name, and Program Files. One thing here commonly is creating a main storage folder with several sub folders for storing various wav files, bmps, jpg, system updates, free utilities, and you name it! When reinstalling Windows you have them still right there.

The clean install would also remove all old drivers and require installing all of the needed drivers and programs fresh. If you've had Windows running for a few years on one installation then the second chance is seen with a brand new system registry with no garbage lingering. For a recent installation the repair install method would be the time saver if your current installation is in good condition. Review the article on this seen at http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
 
I have everything installed :). The only problem I had was when I got into BIOS to check the settings the hard drive wasn't showing up, only the dvd drive on 'secondary master', but nothing on 'primary master'!. Four times I tried fixing it, including checking jumper settings on the hard drive. Finally I swapped the ide cables over between the dvd and hard drive which shouldn't have made a difference, because they're the same type of IDE. Anyway...

Windows seems to be running fine and I haven't performed a repair or anything. Only uninstalled the old ATI drivers, installed the new NVIDIA drivers etc. Do I still need to do the repair? Thank you for your help. Its much appreciated.
 
The DDR2 667 RAM I got...what speed is it meant to be?
this is what Everest reports:

@333mhz 5.0-5-5-15
@266mhz 4.0-4-4-12
@200mhz 3.0-3-3-9

is this correct? I thought 667 was meant to be faster than that.
 
No Windows Repair necessary as far as i know. Also DDR2 sacrifices a bit of the timing latencies for pure speed. You shouldn't worry as the timings don't make much of a difference in The long run.. Sure benchmarks may show 2-3% performance increase with tighter timings, but you'll never notice the difference.:)

Edit: If you meant the actual speeds (333mhz) then you should know that DDR, or double data rate, ram doubles the amount of information sent on the rising and falling of the clock cycle. Making it as if it were running 667mhz. So when it says 333mhz thats its actual speed. 667 is its effective speed.
 
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If Windows is seeming to be running good and you unloaded the old boards in favor of the ones for the new board you should be good to go for some time. If problems were seen right away then you would to look at either using the repair method or seeing a new copy of Windows go on.

It is more of the need for Windows to have a fresh detection of any large amount of hardware changes when you would need to use one of those. For a good examination of all hardwares and softwares on the system a free tool known SIW gives you far more reliable information then everest. All you need to do is double click on it for a readout on everything. You can easily right click on it to create a desktop shortcut if you want. The SIW 1.67 version can be downloaded at http://www.gtopala.com/siw-download.html
 
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