[industrian]

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

Hey guys, I've been looking for a new Harddrive since this 30GB apart from being too small, is showing signs of age as well.

I've heard from a friend who builds a lot of computers that Western Digital seems to be a good bet, so I've been looking at the 320GB ones of WD.

Last month I got a 320 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 3.0 Gb/s (or SATA2). It does it's job and was quite cheap. If you can get a major brand (Seagate/Western Digital/Maxtor) drive fairly cheaply, go for it.

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

The only problem that now has arisen is that I have the following mobo.

You poor bastard. PC Chips = last wrung of the latter. If my Gigabyte GA-8IG1000MK doesn't sell tomorrow, then it's yours for £30. It's only SATA 1.5Gb/s (or SATA) but it's served me fine during the first quarter of the year.

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

It's got SATA support, but at the same time I also see SATA2 harddrives. What's the difference, and would those SATA2 drives also work on my mobo or not?

SATA2 is marketed/called SATA 3.0 Gb/s and is technically twice as fast as normal SATA. I think it's backwards compatible.

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

Another thing that I wanted to upgrade is my ram, currently there's 512 megs of unknown DDR400, bought it in kenya and so far it works great. I wanted to add another 512 to it, and would like to know what would be a good brand. From what I know Kingston is a solid brand, but please correct me if I'm wrong. My motherboard does not support dual channel, so don't take that into consideration. I'm considering buying "Kingston ValueRAM 512MB DDR400" for about 40 euros.

I had Kingston ValueRAM 1GB DDR400 dual channel in my P4 rig for years. It's cheap and does the trick.

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

Finally, I might as well buy myself a new PSU, just to be sure I'm not going to blow when I throw something heavy at the 7800. At this moment I'm running games like Neverwinter Nights, The new Settlers and Serious Sam 2 just fine with most things maxed out (except HDR) and 4x AA, without any stability problems. My current PSU is an MTek 400W with 20 amps on the 12v rail. So I'm kinda low in that respect, especially seeing how the box demands 26. Yet I've read reviews claiming that a solid 20 would be enough for my card.

Anyway, seeing the current one is doing just fine, I'm thinking of sticking with the brand and upgrading to their 460W PSU, which comes with 30 amps on the +12v rail. This way I can buy all three upgrades for less than 200 euros, which is still more than enough to me seeing how I also spend 220 on the videocard.

I would really like to hear the advice of some of the hardware gurus here

Btw, I also heard things about fluctuations in the PSU should not be more than 5% or something, is there a way to monitor this for my current one?

Hiper Type-R FTW. Refraction and myself can't be wrong.

I'm not sure about fluctuations in the PSU, but the trick is to buy a good one to negate the need to worry about them.