£500-£850 Gaming PC?

Cerro

My mistake 1920x1200 is correct. Thats where 320mb cards hit their ceiling. If its the latest games he is talking about then DX10 is what he is looking at and that is the 8xxx series of nvidia cards. But the GTX will give more fps than a GTS - yes that might seem like an academic point right now but as the games catch up it will start to make a bigger difference. The card is ahead of its time but I think its worth it, you'll get that little bit more out of it and imo the graphics card is the single most important component in a gaming PC these days.

SLI is a waste of time, it adds next to nothing performance wise - better doubling your memory before adding an extra gfx card.

Psychofly

Even with DX10 in mind I wouldn't spend all that money on a GTX purely because the DX10 performance is pretty poor when compared with the price of the card. The trouble is 8xxx series cards were released without anything to really test them on... turns out they're not great at DX10. They're amazing at DX9 though. DX10.1 compatible cards will be out soon and anyone wanting to really benefit from DX10 and DX10.1 is going to be looking at getting one of them and prices of the current ones will plummet. Which is why personally I don't think that the GTX is worth the money just now. It's pretty much old technology now since it won't be fully compatible with DX10.1.

SLI isn't a total waste of time - it works amazingly well on games which feature SLI support. Trouble is not all games support it and the ones which don't only see a small gain. Doubling your memory from 2GB to 4GB is pretty much a waste of time in most cases though since 32bit Windows will only reference about 3GB... the extra 1GB will be used for higher level functions but you won't get the performance boost you're expecting. 64bit Windows will address the 4GB correctly but the trouble is most people don't run 64bit and drivers aren't exactly flooding the internet.

Cerro

The lack of 64bit drivers is due to XP 64bit being dead - since drivers are now developed for 64bit Vista instead. But that's not really the point. If I went Vista (or even Ubuntu) it would be 64bit and I'd go with 4Gb of ram. Sticking with XP means 2Gb of ram (no point getting 3Gb because you'd probably have an odd number of sticks and not be able to use dual channel memory). When going for a gaming machine, i'd go with the ram over the 2nd graphics card, the performance improvement is much more noticeable - if you're getting a good PC, when go with an old OS?

With SLI you are effectively doubling your costs, its better to buy 1 excellent graphics card like a 8800GTX with more ram than get two 8800GTS with less ram. Yes SLI makes a difference but its not a big one and in my view its not value for money.

Yes DX10.1 will make a difference to graphics cards and their current prices but that is always the case, if its not a new DX version then its a new series of cards with improved performance over the old ones and the value of the old cards drop - it happens more frequently now, partly due to marketing and partly due to competition (although ATI/AMD really seem to be struggling with their graphics cards right now)

Bamber19

We haven't even seen proper Dx10 games yet. There's been a couple with some crap, tiny DX-10 features but wait until Crysis and the like, there's already comparisons out and you can really see it, and all these have been produced on 8800 GTX systems.

Secondly, why not get a GTX, it'll have a longer life and the GTS is already appearing as recommended spec on games and i've rarely seen a game that runs smooth at max settings on even it's recommended spec.

As for the Dell you're thinking of buying, by all means if it fits your desires and you're happy with the price go for it but be aware he probably got it for around £700...with a 22" monitor as i seen the same deal at the time and got it with a few upgrades for a bit more cash.

dbtor

Went to see it last night, tested out a few brand new games on it and watched some HD videos, all seemed in order - it practically hadn't been touched. I decided to buy it and he transferred the warranty over to me then and there while I was messing around on CoD4, hopefully the warranty will be in my name either today or monday. Haven't had chance to set it up at home though, he says if there is any problems or i'm not happy with it I can take it back to him and get a full refund. Really nice, genuine guy and a good buy imo