To tell you the truth, alpowerfull, you probably won't really be able to tell the difference between 9600 and 8500, and for that matter, between 9600 and 5300. There would be a difference, but it would be pretty minor. The question you should ask yourself is how much you're willing to pay for small improvements in FPS.

Also, in terms of performance, the last timing (tRAS) has very little impact on performance. You could potentially go from tRAS 10 to tRAS 20 with essentially zero impact on FPS.

Uhh... I wouldn't reccomend setting up a water cooling system if you don't know what is for what purpose. So I'll do my best to tell you what kind of parts you need, and you can decide what to get.

A basic water cooling kit contains a water block, a pump, a reservoir, a radiator, and a lot of tubes and hose clamps. Sometimes some of these things are combined (a radiator/reservoir, for example). The general idea is that the coolant is pumped from the reservoir through the water block, where it picks up heat from your components. The coolant then flows out to the radiator, where it is cooled (works like a car radiator, throw a fan on it and it dissipates the heat). The coolant then flows back into the reservoir, which is there to allow thermal expansion of the coolant while keeping air bubbles out of the loop. It is also where you would "top off" the coolant.

What you think you need is up to you. The main ideas behind liquid cooling are: bigger radiator+more airflow+high flow pump=better cooling.

Well, in a nutshell, 2>1. 2 processor cores>1core, dual-channel RAM>single channel RAM, RAID0>single HD.

2 cards SLI or Crossfire will generally give you anywhere from 10-50% better performance in 3d apps and games.

2 cards not in Crossfire or SLI will allow you to plug more monitors into your video cards (I think you might be able to do this with crossfire enabled on ATI cards, but I never really had a reason to test it)

Good case, lots of room, ventilation, and good cable management (except that when you route cables behind the mobo tray, you can still see them through the back mesh... meh). The case weighs about half a ton, though. They used a lot of steel, and probably some lead to make the case.

http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html

Now to see what they can do...

8400GS ftw :). I got a PCIE one in my home computer. It's not really a good gaming card, but it gets the job done. There's like a neverending list of features it supports but can't really use. 16xAA, PhysX, and Dx10 support FTW.

I didn't even know they still made regular PCI cards. But I would think that even that card would be bottlenecked by the PCI interface.

There's a couple things you can do if you know what the virus is. First, turn on view hidden and system files in explorer and go to the Windows\System folder and delete the file (usually it's in there... if not, run a file search for it).

Also, make sure there's no extra programs in the startup menu.

Last easy thing you can do manually is to go start->run and type "msconfig". Go to the startup tab and uncheck everything that looks suspicious. You can always go back in and re-check it if you turn off something you want.