I have just bought a radeon 9600pro and am gutted to find that overclockers.co.uk and scan are now doing the 9800 pro for under 130 quid. This has to be the best bargain of the year so far. I have also been informed that the ones overclockers are selling are in fact the R360 cores with samsung memory which can easily be overclocked to the xt!!

If your in need of an upgrade be quick as these wont last long.

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Well look at it this way. If you could buy a Ferrari for 60 grand, or you could get the same car for 20 grand but you will have to travel a little further to pick it up, which would you choose?

I'll explain using a processor for example.

When components are made they are made in one batch then clocked down/rebadged accordingly. Take the AMD 2500+ with the Barton core. This is actually a 3200+ just relabled and set to run as a 2500+. The reason companies do this is due to the fact that it costs no more to produce a 3200+ processor than it does a 2500+ processor so they just mass produce the 3200+.

At that time the market was strong for the 2500+ so they just underclocked them and sold them as a 2500+ to meet customer demand. Now the demand is for a higher processor AMD are selling them as the normal 3200+ but those lucky enough to get them at the very cheap price of a 2500+ can easily overclock it to meet the speed of the 3200+. Only last month you could still buy these 2500+ processors at about ?50 compared to around ?150 for the 3200+.

So you can buy a cheap PC setup and boost it up to meet demand for the now power hungry games such as Unreal Tournamant 2004 and FarCry at no extra cost.

The same applies to graphics cards. You can buy a cheap Geforce fx5900xt for about ?130 and just up the memory timings and you almost have a monster Geforce 5950ultra that would cost you almost ?300.

I hope u got the jist of all that    Cheaper components dont always mean less performance.

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Your right Boss, heat is a problem. You have to upgrade both cooling for the processor and the case. Also adding heatsinks to the memory on the graphics card is a good tip, also a better fan but this can be tricky. Cooling is not expensive, about 20 quid for a good cooler, a couple of quid for some case fans and a couple of quid for some heatsinks.

As for the inferior quality, not at all, like I said its all just to meet customer demand. There was no demand for the 3200+ at the time so AMD just made the batch and underated them. A lot cheaper for production this way.

I haven't overclocked as I don't even know what the potential of Athlon 64 is yet, but I do know people who do it for the 32 bit systems and they get better frame rates in the top games.

Its all down to personal preferance, if you don't feel comfortable don't do it is what I say. To be honest a 2500+ will run all games smoothly at the moment, but say in 6-12 months time when demand for games gets bigger then so will the demand to push the PC that little bit further. Thats where those people who overclock benefit from the savings as most of us will just go out and buy that faster processor and video card.

So all in all those who overclock get about one third longer use out of their pc's than those who don't.

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To be honest a 2500+ will run all games smoothly at the moment, but say in 6-12 months time when demand for games gets bigger then so will the demand to push the PC that little bit further.

Why not just buy a games machine ? Sounds like you are spending loads of ? on a pc when a Xbox or PS2 will play games for much longer than 6-12 months ?

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Have you tried playing first person shooters with a joypad?

I`ve never tried anything with a joypad ...  

I am 100% not into games ... My PC`s are for business and a tool for making ? ...  

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