New Stuff Coming Thoughts And Help Please

[bigjonnyauk]

HI ALL

well eventually ordered my new stuff on a bit of a budget so there are limitations what do you think

TAGAN 480 PSU (bought last week)

ASUS A7N8X-DELUXE MOBO

AMD BARTON XP 2500XP PROCESSOR

512 MG CORSAIR TWINX PC3200 DDR RAM (couldnt afford a gig)

LITEON DVDRW WRITER

LEADTEK A350TDH GEFORCE FX5900 (SOFTMODDED TO 5950)(had this a couple of months in old system )

other bits taken from old system
modded raidmax alien case and soundblaster audigy


right question time if you can help

i keep hearing things about dont load the nforce 2 chipset drivers that come on the disk use others WHAT OTHERS

also dont use the ide driver on nforce 2 chipset use the windows one how do i not install it then

and last a really stupid one but i have heard different ways from different people

what is the best way to format harddrive in windows or get a bootdisk from net and do it proper then format

ahhh one last one now i have ordered a dvdrw which does everything (i really dont use cdrom/dvd that much or write loads of stuff would it be advantageous to just have this installed on it own ide as master with no other cdrom/dvd drives there

am thinking cable saving maybe quicker its not like i burn all day or load loads of stuff from disk few games here and there

[SilentDeath]

a7n8x mobos usually struggle on fsb, unless its cheaper than the other boards by £10-20 Id go for the nf7-s or one of the DFI boards...

the psu is good chioce.. so is the barton.

You will find, if playing games, that 1gb of mem (or even 768mb of mem), even if its slow pc2700 cas2.5-3 ram will play a lot better than 512mb of uber fast cas2, farcry is an example of this, at 512mb it was jumpy, add another stick and its perfect. my brother had the smae prob, add a slow stick of 256mb pc2700 to his 512mb corsair and again, no more jumpyness...
That said the 512mb corsair is a good chioce and you can always upgrade later, even if its much slower mem it might help a lot. Dont get twinx either, dual chan doesnt help THAT much and its nicer to just have 2 sticks when you get the next ram... which you will need for farcry

liteon drives ive only heard good stuff about...

Download the latest drivers or if you can be arsed get one of the edited driver packs. The IDE driver and soundstorm are to things that have always had bad drivers, so you might have to try a few different sets to get it the way you want...

I would use maxblast3 for a format, downlaod it from maxtors site, best thing about it is it runs from cd, its quick and does loads of other usefull stuff too...

Update the bios for the board too, theres been a LOT of fixes for nf2 boards...

[bigjonnyauk]

right have already ordered this like i said i aint gonna uber clock so with price in mind i went for the asus has i heard good things its the updating bios thing thats gonna bug me it worrys me silly

the ram is not twinx just looked at order and it normal corsair dual channel 2x256 meg while not brilliant it will do till i can afford a gig of good stuff

any help re flashing bios would be nice

also this unified driver thing do these have the sound and ide drivers taken out then as i have a audigy and will use that

[CrapshoT]

you can flash the bios from windows using the asus update tool its easy,honest,just a couple of clicks.i found uber bios 1005 to be best.
layzeh(soz if ive spelt it wrong)does a good unified set of drivers,as for the sw or ide driver just click on NO when it asks if you want to install it.
my mobo was very picky with the type of ram it liked.
decent set-up there m8,another 512mb of ram and you'll be laughing !!!

[bigjonnyauk]

crapshot i just had a look on the bioses on the site and apperently 1005 is the release bios and there is only 2 more after that which just give better compatibility for ram so you saying i shoud stick to the bios it comes with

i mean i couldnt find any bios with nforce 2 updates

wanna try and get as much on to this comp to transfer onto cd before it comes apart cuz if i get stuck then i am in s@@t creek lol

[CrapshoT]

get the uber bios' from here
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/michael.mcclay/
i meant the 1005 uber bios,not the original asus bios my apologies m8