im wanting to get a new fan,ram and motherboard. i need suggestions plz
At the moment i have:
AOC 19" Flat
Logitech Cordless Freedom Optical keyboard & Mouse
Juster 803 Speakers (1sub 4 satellite speakers )
Pannasionic FDD
Liteon 48x12x48x
Pioneer 16x slot dvd rom
Pixel View tv/radio capture card
Surecom 320-X-R 10/100 network card
Swann Smart II V.92 Internal Modem
Sound Blaster Live DE 5.1 SE sound card
Leadtek GeForce 4 Ti4200 ddr myvivo(tvout dvi in)
Gigabyte GA7VTXE+ includes ddr266,sound,5pci, dual bios motherboard
Thermal Take Volcano 7 Fan
two 8cm Case Fans
Case has 4 Bays, 2 front usb, 240volt 300watt.
Maxtor 80Gig 7200 Hard Drive
512mb DDR pc2100 M. tec Ram

I am selling My Motherboard, Ram and Volcano 7 fan for $465
Im going to spend $60max on a fan, $235max on a motherboard and $335max on ram. what parts should i get? i havnt heard of epox before, asus & gigabyte are the two popular good brands of motherboards in australia
For the fan im thinking a thermaltake volcano 7+ $55 (or any good quite one) also i dont really need raid, i have one hard drive and wont be getting another one. what exactly is raid and what can it do??
also does any one know when the kk400 motherboards will be coming out ? in what brand and how much in Australian?

the motherboard:
asus a7v333 $235 or
gigabyte 7vrxp raid $224 or
gigabyte 7vrx $165 or
gigabyte 8irxp $228 or
epox 8k3a $180 or
epox 8k3a + $219

and the ram:
512mb pc2700 samsung 333mhz CAS-2.5 $283 or
512mb pc3200 samsung 400Mhz $? or

512mb pc2700 corsair xms (XTREME MEMORY SPEED) 333mhz CAS2 $? or
512mb pc3000 corsair xms 370mhz CAS2 $? or
512mb pc3200 corsair xms 400mhz CAS2.5 $?

I live in Australia so all prices are austrlian, so the ppl in america remember to double your prices when you are giving prices, thanks for the help. by the way this pc is for games.

RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

A raid controller will allow you to use 2 or more (usually 4 max for cheap IDE ones such as promise fast trak100) hard drive in conjunction with eachother. This is based on raid levels (configurations that can be used) which, from the usual IDE controllers are limited to RAID 0, 1, 0+1, SPAN

Span will take the two drives and add them together. Once one hard drive is filled up, the other will start to fill as well. The OS will see this as a single drive that is the 2 drives (or more) added together.

RAID 0 - stripe mode. This will add the two hard drives together by this formula:
2 x smallest HDD in RAID
The OS will also see this as a single drive and the HDD are used together. Say you need to write a 128k block. If the array is set up to use 64k chunks (64k to each HDD at once) you can write 128k in the amount of time it takes to write 64k "theoretically." There is no redundancy here, so if one HDD crashes, all data on the array is lost. ALL of it. This is why I stopped using RAID 0 (just recently after some more HDD issues - I have all the luck).

RAID 1 - mirror mode. This will be seen to the OS as a single HDD with the size of the smallest drive in the array. Data will be written to each HDD at the same time, but 128k to each - so this is effectively a HDD with redundancy.

RAID 0+1 - best of both worlds - requires more HDD's (minimum of 4).

This is a very general description and there are certain things that may need more explanation. There are different levels of RAID, and I used to be a RAID pimp, but now I am all for single ATA drives, and with serial ATA coming out soon, why the hell not.

Here is a manual from promise who's manuals are the best I've seen. It may answer some questions.
http://www.promise.com/support/file/FT100_Manual_En.pdf


Now, as far as your original question goes, the ASUS A7V333 is a board that I have and have not had any major problems with it. Just like any motherboard, it takes some time to get used to it (alotta jumpers - some that are undocumented ie: RAM voltages) but EPOX has great boards, although I have heard of some issues with enermax power supplys recently. I forget who it was but somebody on this board had a problem with epox/enermax. If time isnt critical, I would wait for the kt400 chipset before upgrading to the kt333. With RAM, you may as well go for some pc2700 or better. I like a 512MB min, but I run alotta applications. As far as brands go, you cant go wrong with cruucial, micron, mushkin - and I have had some excellent generic RAM as well. The thermaltake Volcano 7+ is a good cooler, but I have read that it can be a little loud, but thanks to the switch over the volcano 7, the user may turn the fan down.

I would buy Kingston memory. It might be a little bit more expensive but it is worth it. It is good quality memory. If I were you I would upgrade the memory to the MAX that is possible. Is especially good for speeding up shutdown and startup of games.

I've had good luck with Samsung. I've also heard very, very, very good things about Corsair---I can't recall a single complaint at all.

For the motherboard...

The KT400 boards are on their way, as well as the nForce 2 boards. The KK400 is a specific KT400 board that is to be released by Iwill;)
If you can wait a month, you should see boards based on the KT400 and nForce 2 start being available.

I don't know if you're one that has anything against Via, but if you do, I'd highly suggest looking at the nForce 2 boards.

If you need to buy right now, look at the Abit NV7-133R (nForce 415) or the MSI KT3 Ultra. These are very good boards. The Asus and Gigabyte boards seem to have some serious problems from what I've been reading. Also, Abit's KX7-333 seems to be very good as well.