Computer Stores in Calgary

[DanG]

Originally Posted by Slick Fork

I will be doing some gaming with the system, the most resource intensive games played on it are the total war series, oblivion, and IL-2.

It seems lots of people recommend the gigabyte boards, I've had 2 Asus boards that I liked, 1 gigabyte board that I didn't. My knowledge level and desire to tinker with computers is extremely limited. After I set a system up, I just want to use it and the gigabyte board seemed to need a lot of babysitting. I just want plug and play, the extent of my overclocking has been limited to fiddling with the FSB, or using the handy ASUS percentage based overclock!! I have also heard good things about the eVGA based MB's.

I was considering the ati hd3850 for a video card, always had ati but I suppose it wouldn't kill me to look at NVIDIA. A question on cards, have ATI and NVIDIA gotten completely out of manufacturing these cards? I've always had a genuine ATI card and now I feel lost as I don't know how an ASUS branded ATI would stack up against a saphire, or an eVGA would stack up against a BFG.

I agree on the Western Digital HD and I'll start out with a matched pair of 2x1gb DDR2 800 RAM

Stick with the Intel P35 or X38 chipsets. The nVidia chipsets (the ones that eVGA uses on their motherboards) are great if you want to run SLI (dual nvidia video cards), but they run noticibly hotter than the Intel chipsets.
If you're planning on overclocking, step up to DDR2 1066 ram. If you get it on sale, it's not much more than DDR2 800, but will also give you a bit more headroom if you're overclocking. Be careful with overclocking on the stock Intel heatsink. It's great at stock speeds, but once you take something like the 2.4GHz Q6600 past 2.8 or so GHz, things get a bit warm.