Should have mentioned, it's a Dell, I'll try everest, thanks, still open to suggestions though.

I've searched these forums & google with no success :( any help would be great, thanks - I'm just checking to see if my mobo can support PCI-E.

Unfortunately I have Phoenix bios therefore I can't find out what my bios are through them, although they do say the date: 11/21/2006 if it helps... + the numbers 1.02.23, but I don't know what that means either. Thanks again in advance!

I reccommend fraps, you can take screenshots with it, take videos (w/ sound) and view your fps in any corner of the screen you like.

www.fraps.com

Ok thanks for the TFT info, the reviews for the acer crystalbrite look really good, and the contrast is 2000:1

is 2000:1 better than say 800:1?

Which is better? I'm looking for a new monitor (at least 19" widescreen)

A £100 LCD flat panel widescreen monitor with acontrast ratio of 2000:1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-P193W-Crystalbrite-Widescreen-Monitor/dp/B000VPG16G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1199645602&sr=1-1

A 20" £140 TFT widescreen monitor - 2000:1 contrast ratio

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/3249980/LG-L204WT-20-Widescreen-TFT-Monitor/Product.html

How important is contrast ration and TFT/LCD? Any and all help would be great, thanks.

CRYSIS FTW, I agree. CoD4 is far too linear, rat a tat tat for my liking.

FPS:CRYSIS

RTS:WiC

Served in the army before? COD4

btw you could just try the demos for each of the games. Just a thought.

Technically Vista always uses 100% of ram. Or let me rephrase that, Vista always loads 100% of ram with something. It "tries" to be smart (without much success) at figuring out what apps you will use when it first boots up. Which means if you load a game that is not already in memory, then the system has to take time to clear out the garbage that Vista loaded before the game will run. I suspect this type of memory management is partly why Vista does not perform as well with games as XP does. Qixote

[QUOTE="PerfectGamer17"][QUOTE="nizzleton"][QUOTE="nizzleton"][QUOTE="Baranga"]

Vista is hungry for RAM and CPU. It consumes about 800 Mb of RAM, while XP only about 250. Those 550 really matter in games today!

Vista's only benefit is DX10.

DJGOON

Are you lying or just plain ignorant? Vista barely used 512mb (sometimes dropped to 350mb) on my 1gb of ram. If you have the money to get Vista you have the money to get a decent amount of ram and processing power - thus I doubt it's just 'vista is hungrier than xp' otherwise we'd all be on 98, yes?

because they don't know what there doing.

As I have said before, Vista is nothing but a case of "build it and they will come". Its packagd up bloatware offering promises of better gaming for gamers and better security for businesses yet falls short in delivering them. Windows XP is perfectly fine for what we need but Microsoft needs to keep the Windows cycle going around to keep their profits up. Once they get enough market penetration with Vista they can then scrap Windows XP support, forcing the remaining of us left to upgrade. Then in mabye 4-5 years time this whole needless cycle will repeat.

yeah 4-5 years new OS is coming but you do know M$ don't need to keep their profits up, right? M$ are far from 'in debt', they have plenty of money, so they don't NEED to replenish it by bringing out some random OS. It's fallen short in nothing imo, and it's only fault is slowed gaming when you have idiots with half a gig of ram and a crap 3 year old gfx card expecting awesome framerates.

There's a beautiful acer one here from play.com for a mere £119.99 ($239) but it's only a 19" widescreen.

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/3508400/Acer-P193W-Crystalbrite-19-Widescreen-LCD-Monitor-Piano-Black/Product.html