HANDS ON GUIDE

Section 1: What's inside the PC?

Total Price: £446.63 inc VAT

What's more, we found that the memory on this card was incredibly overclockable. Bear in mind that you'll only be using the extra memory only when running games at high resolutions with lots of anti-aliasing. This graphics card will be fine when running games at 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,680 x 1,050, which is ideal for a 4:3 19in monitor or 20/22in widescreen monitor.

The other reason that this card is cheaper than a lot of GeForce 8800 cards is because it uses Nvidia's new 8800 GT GPU, codenamed G92, which has 112 stream processors and is clocked at 600MHz. This means that the core is clocked higher than the 575MHz of a standard GeForce 8800 GTX. Once you've overclocked the memory, this is an incredible graphics card for the money.

Hard disk and optical drive
Price: £45.80 inc VAT

Hard disks and DVD burners are ridiculously cheap these days, and you don't even need to skimp on hard disk space. You can now buy a 160GB Hitachi 7K160 for less than £30. The best feature of this drive, though, is that your 160GB is on a single platter; this means that it doesn't have to skip between platters to access data, making it pretty quick. The drive also has the now-standard rotational speed of 7,200rpm, as well as 8MB of cache.

Meanwhile, the DVD burner we chose is made by Optiarc, which is a joint venture between Sony and NEC. Its simple, black fascia won't look out of place in the Cooler Master chassis, and it has decent DVD writing speeds too.

The operating system: Windows Vista Home Premium OEM
Price: £59.68 inc VAT

There's a confusing array of options for Windows Vista, and it's hard to know which to choose. The simple answer is the Home Premium edition, which has everything a PC gamer needs, including DirectX 10 and Windows Media Center.

Of course, the Ultimate edition has all this and more, so wouldn't that be better? Nope, not unless you'll use the business features. Don't be tempted by the Ultimate extras either; so far, they consist of some video wallpapers and a few games such as Texas Hold 'Em.

You then need to choose between the OEM or the retail version. This is a big decision. The OEM version is supposed to be installed only on new-build PCs by manufacturers. Microsoft intends to enforce this by having the OS detect the PC's motherboard and refuse to activate Windows if there's a different motherboard from the one originally installed.

This means you can't upgrade the motherboard; if you do, you'll need to buy a new OEM version of Windows. We've heard of a few people managing to persuade Microsoft to reactivate Windows, as their PC just went in for 'repairs' that entailed a replacement motherboard. However, we wouldn't recommend this, as it isn't guaranteed to work.

If you want an upgrade-proof version of Vista, buy the full retail version (£197.36 inc VAT) or the upgrade version (£132.76 inc VAT). However, if you plan to use this PC for a few years and won't replace the motherboard, the OEM version is fine.

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