£500 Graphics Solution

I wonder if any of my fellow geeks here could give me a little non-clothes related shopping advise please :)

I'm hopelessly out of date in terms of building PC's, i've not looked much at component sales in a long time and i've certainly not built a water cooled system before.

I am considering water cooling, in all i'm looking to spend somewhere in the region of £2500 ($5000ish) on an all new PC w/o monitor, I figure a budget in the region of £500 should give satisfactory graphics performance.

As far as I can tell from the browsing i've done thus far this gives me the option of either a twin (SLI) nVidia 7800GT 256mb setup or a single nVidia 7800GTX 512mb card, although to be honest the catalogue sites are suiteably vague about whether the boxes they are selling are already SLI solutions or not on account of them buildng their websites purely on manufacturer press releases.

What would you guys consider to be the better graphics solution of these? Or failing that a good non-ATI solution in the region of £500?

If anyone has any advise on water cooling systems i'd also be interested to hear it, especially with regard to issues around getting a water cooled solution onto an SLI setup.

Yes I know overclocking an SLI setup isn't in any way necessary - but i've got a bit of cash now and i'm fed up of having a second rate system so old that a Dell laptop could outperfom it.

Five minced pies > one eccles cake so there.

2 in SLI 256mb is definitelly better.

Water cooling, remember you need to connect it to a tap as well and it can be noisy. Not practical unless you're playing games 8 hours a day and need the extra 3 FPS very desperately. Just get a nice air cooler and a big housing (which you will need to clean every month or so).

Don't do it. A good copper/alu heatsink is much better. Even the best pumps I've seen are much noisier than a good (Papst for example) heatsink fan, the reservior is usually large, heavy and doesn't fit sensibly into the case, and one leaky carrier tube is all it takes to make a really bad day worse, for you and your £500 graphics card(s).

A shame you feel that way. Crossfire really is superior to SLI.

@OEJ: Okaaaaay.
@Len: Thanks, the more I look into SLI the more i'm inclined to agree with you.
@Flameduck: Thanks for the advise on water cooling and I shall definately do more research before plummeting for it. On ATI the last I looked (November) the 7800GT outperformed the top ATI card and was significantly cheaper (with the GTX putting ATI very completely to shame), and as a former techie for a wholesaler I have to say the return rate on ATI is nigh on ludicrous - with two cards in the system and the intention to overclock (because I can) I really would preffer nVidia, who have the benefit of overclocking built into the drivers (and the motherboard I intend to buy - Asus A8N-SLI SE).

We went here years ago; needing two graphics cards is a sure sign the card makers do not have the right toys in the toy box.

In time they will have. Just like last time.

Once they do, the two card set ups will fall back into history just as fast and maybe even faster than last time.

This will leave anyone who's got one, with an out of date set up, and then no drivers to support obsolete hardware, just like last time.

They will aslo have a sizable chunk of cash gone missing in exchange for their short lived benefit, just like last time.

Only thing you can say about last time which has lasting value is that it is a known phenomenon, and we can at least learn from it.

One of the wisest things anyone could do now is to show that we as consumers remember the last time and buy a one card set up, and this would force the makers to come up with the new toys they should have thought about some time ago. The two card set ups simply feed more cash to a system that's clearly in need of repair. Buying twice as much from them will fix nothing for the future. But it is a choice, which is something I must suppose.

Very cynical, but he has a point. Where's your holiday cheer? Bec should be allowed to finance bad business to her heart's content =]

Well this is my design so far, i'm going to save my DVD+- burner and screen but otherwise it's a gorgeous looking machine with suiteably large turbo under hood. I've ignored water cooling for now, the m/b and existing drivers fully support overclocking should I add it though.

4600+ AMD Dual Core CPU
£450
4x 400DDR PC3200 512mb DIMM
£140 (£590)
2x GeForce 7800 GT 256mb
£270 (£1130)
1x Seagate Barracude 200gb SATA 7200rpm 8mb (ultra quiet hard disk)
£60 (£1190)
1x Asus A8N-SLI SE Motherboard
£75-90 [£80] (£1270)
1x Asus Red Vento 3600 ATX Case
£80 (£1350)
1x Eye-T 550watt ATX Dual Fan PSU
£30 (£1380)
1x Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Sound Card
£150 (£1530)
1x Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
£40 (£1570)
1x Razer Diamondback Magma Mouse
£30 (£1600)

If you look at 3dmarks actual performance, sli doesn't really give a great deal of extra performance, on a high spec pc anyhows. To me buying two top end cards that will be obselete is in 2 months is pointless,much better off spending the money on beer.

Bleh, two bottles of proper junniper berry Gin lasted me all xmas and i've still got a bit left... I'm not a heavy drinker, but I do use the computer a lot.

Nothing wrong with SLI, bear in mind that the extra performance benefits really only exist in super high resolutions. The Difference betweem a 6600GT and 7800GT at lower resolutions 1024x768 full detail is often only 15% - 30%. Its only when you go into 1600x1200 and higher that you get a significant 2x boost in performance.

Do you really need that much GPU now? Or get a single 7800GT and see how you like it. My 6600GT is more than adequate to play any current game at 1024x768 with all the details on no problem.

Havent a clue what system you use now, my humble A64 3200+ is air cooled and quieter than my previous athlon1200 that my wife inherited.

Jeremy and I both updated our graphics cards recently, and the difference in performance isn't that great if you don't have the high res monitor.

He still uses a 15" which blew me away. Hope you have a nice big shiny high res monitor to make the expense of the video cards worthwhile.

I currently use a 17" CRT that runs at 1240x1024, but my current system typically sees me playing games at 800x600 with moderate detail settings. I plan to upgrade the monitor to a 19" active matrix wall mounted display later in the year but the model i'm currently looking at (Acer AL1951A) only supports a maximum resolution of 1240x1024.

I think there are higher res screens but i've drawn a compromise because of responce time (a staggering 8ms) dot pitch (a pretty nice 0.264mm), brightness (an average 300cd/m2), and contrast (a decent 700:1).

I will purchase one card before the other because i'll be buying the system over 2-3 paycheques, but whether I have SLI influences motherboard purchase which in turn influences everything else, so it's not sensible to get ready for SLI and then try out just a single card :/

I currently use a 2200+ clocked to report as 2600+, with 512mb Ram, 133mhz bus and an FX5200 - so this is a huge upgrade but hey, computing is what I do with almost all of my spare time...

What i'm currently umming and arring about is the processor. The 4400+ has 1mb cache per core and is £100 cheaper, the 4600+ is faster but only has 512kb per core. Cache makes a big impact on games (as the hit rate with arrays and matrixes are higher), so i'm not sure it's worth getting the faster clock speed although most of what I do is making my own games (3dsmax/psp/B3D/BMax etc) so...?

Also i'm curious if half the difference in clockspeed with the 4400+/4600+ isn't because of the extra distance to the other half of the cache...?

What chip is really faster? If the 4600+ only has a minor advantage then it really isn't worth the extra £100 - or is this even like the old P133/P150 scenario when the P133 outperformed the 150 in almost all tasks...

XFX GeForce 7800 GTX (512MB, 16x PCI Express) Get the SLI compatible version with two DVI outputs.

I'd go for the fast single card.
I'm also considering the zalman reservator water cooling system, gets good reviews and is silent.

You should hold off blowing a massive budget on a video card until you find out if dx10 will require shader 4.0 only, or if shader 3.0 will work.

You will want 2 SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration - it's the single sheapest, most important performance upgrade you can get.

Oh, and get an AC Ryan cable free PSU. The difference having only absolutely nessecary powercables inside your makes is truely remarkable, both in lack of clutter and airflow.

I have the AL1751 which does the same resolution. It's an awesome screen for the price. I can't imagine a 19" screen doing the same resolution wouldn't seem "too low" tho'.

You may want to read up on SLI. From what I've heard it (a bit like Dual Channel RAM) is pretty picky with regards to which graphics cards it works with (which is why I recomended CrossFire instead). I have a friend who had to go through 3 pairs of seemingly identical graphics cards until he finally got a couple that worked. Was rather an expensive ordeal for him, but at least the rest of us got some cheap second hand high performance graphics cards.

A point well made, and one I'm sure people who bought X600 and X800 Radeon cards have learnt the hard way.

The 4600+ is really faster. Cache size is less significant these days, as very few algorithms are cache friendly. Unless you have rediculous cache sizes like on Intel Xeon processors, you are never going to notice a significant difference.

Where are you getting those prices from? You can get much cheaper parts than that in several places I've found so far.

You're mad if you go for SLI, unless it's 2x7800GTX 512's. Don't go for the 256 version if you can afford the 512. As much as the extra RAM is good, the performance of the 512 is quite a leap over the 256.

Just buy a single 512 now and the other one in 2-3 years

It's very untrue that SLI will become obsolete any time soon. Especially if you had a look at the recent discussion about CPU improvements. SLI can only disappear in such a way that they will actually package two cards and call it one.

The thing about why two cards are faster is that to use the memory of 512 you'll see that most modern games arent compatible for it. I have a friend who got 512mb and his Battlefield 2 game kept crashing. We found that this is due to memory leaks and when i looked further into it the devs said on one forum (i think) that all modern games have this problem of controlling huge memory transfers and that some will simply slow down when they cant handle it, so 256 vs 512 isnt worth the difference this year. Maybe next year or in 2 years. But then again maybe it depends on what games you play.

PS. You have a nice rig there Becky, can i come and play sometimes?

Lenn: Sorry fella, I didn't follow a word of what you were saying there.

Battlefield 2 got patched to fix the memory leaks. That it wouldn't work with 512MB... you're probably talking about system RAM, not graphics RAM.

I'm trying to steer the OP in the direction of a 7800GTX 512MB because I've got a 7800GTX 256MB and it bugs me that I've not got the fastest graphics card anymore. Mine is actually 3rd fastest behind the 7800GTX 512 and ATI X1800 XT.

If I had a choice to upgrade either to 2x 7800GTX 256's in SLI mode, or 1x 7800GTX 512, I'd choose the 512.

Lenn John, mate!

"It's very untrue that SLI will become obsolete any time soon."

You are just the clairvoyant I've been looking for; have you got 6 numbers for saturday night you feel like sharing?

If I win even I will buy two cards and help you to be certain to be right too!

@ Toby, Me? Cynical? Damn right I am! From birth to standing here I could not get like that without the help I've had forced upon me from others, and that's well worth bearing in mind with cynical. Some crazy people even look on the positive side and call it experience, they even think about if and or how they can learn from it. I know, crazy stuff eh!? ;O)

15 32 7 1 26 21

Luvvly jubbly.

This time next year, we could all be millyonaires!

kooshti! ;O)

"PS. You have a nice rig there Becky, can i come and play sometimes?" you shoulda said "rack" not "rig" hehe, sorry ...

Actually gotta say that really you'll be paying a premium for not much better performance than my now cheapo, once great PC (this will happen to your PC to in time of course). Unless you wanna play the best FPS shooters at silly res, what's the point? I just played COD2 in 800x600 with AA off to ensure I had top frame rate, sure it looks a bit nicer in 1280x768 AA on but when you're trying to stick bombs on the back of a panzer whilst the SS are shooting up your ass, it doesn't really matter imho. Why not save 1/2 the cost and put it towards a cool 80's sports car or something?

I couldn't agree more, but it's a less essential upgrade than the main bulk of the computer itself for the moment. I can't get SATA now because I dont have a SATA motherboard, so one step at a time.


I sort of agree with you, the resolution isn't as impressive as the rest of the monitors stats which, with the exception of an average brightness level, are otherwise exceptional. However i'm putting the screen a lot further away from me than the 17" CRT i'm used too so I think i'll be happy with the res.


Ball park including VAT prices to use as a guideline only, when I actually buy this stuff next month my requirements are so specific per component (down to specifying the exact make/model of RAM I want) that I will be paying quite a lot for postage to get everything from the various different suppliers. I feel that little details like a RAM CAS latency of 2-2-2-5 is worth paying for when building a wet dream system, otherwise I may aswell just go out and buy a piece of mainstream compromiseware.


By the time i've finished with the detail bits (keyboard/mouse/suiteably tacky neon lamps etc) it'll be summer and well out of date.


Already had a 1920's roadster, but I flogged it to my brother because it was too much work for me to maintain. I dont use the car outside of work, but I do use the computer. I dont watch telly often, but I do use the computer...

So I pay a premium, I want a shebang wollop yahoo system that wont be top of the range by the time i've finished paying for it, and will be totally out of date in 2-3 years - but who says all the bits will still be in it in 2-3 years? Certainly not me,

This rig gentlemen, is not my computer. It is my starting block. :)

...And believe me it's got to be better then the heap of junk i've been nursing along for the last few years, powering it on 6 times to get it to boot because the PSU is underweight, reseating the keyboard connector every 30 minutes because of a loose connection, avoiding use of the mousewheel because it jams, and stripping out the background tasks every few days to try and get 3dsMax to load inside of 3 minutes.

I'm going for the 4400+ because it's a lot cheaper for, given the tasks i'm doing, not such a big performance differencce. I'm going to go for SLI but I might stretch to the 256mb GTX instead of the GT if I can as they're only about £30-40 apart.

Becky, consider quality quiet components. My Qtechnology 460W PSU with 12cm fan is quiet, powerful and v. reliable.

I looked at the QTechnology PSU's but they are as ugly looking as the day a practically minded scientist designed the very first ATX unit.

The one I chose is 550w with twin fans but the fans are only 80mm so are a lot quiter than traditional 120mm units. Also it projects a neon green glow into the computer and a blue glow onto the backwall - and that's just too funky to ignore.

I may be nuts, but i'm nuts with style ;)

I missed this, fyi: cache hits occur most readily on array and matrix operations which occur most frequently in games. I'll have the dual core to speed up my application usage quite substantially already so i'm opting for the cash saving and larger cache - escuse the pun...

hunh, the point of the 120mm fan is it spins slower than the 80mm ones so the 120mm is the quieter one!

Only on very small arrays and matrices, and only if you're accessing it sequentially. The cache only prefetches about 128 bytes or so of data at a time...

You may want to find sound dB ratings on those -- in general, larger fans are quieter than small ones, since they can produce the same airflow at a slower rotational speed. Faster rotations also produce a higher-pitch whine which tends to be a lot more noticable than a low pitch background noise.

Anyone who ever spend a minute with a 1U rackmount server on his desk knows that those tiny fans are insanely noisy.

I have a Dell tower under my desk here with a single (huge) fan inside of it, and its inaudiable quiet. Anyway, if you do happen to find a dB rating, keep in mind that the decibel scale is logarithmic, a difference of 3dB means double (or half) the noise level.

GA: We agree once more, this is starting to become a trend...

Smaller fans = more noise. Grab a 480W fanless rather than a 550W with fans. 480W is plenty for the rig you're planning, so long as you don't want ridiculous overclocking.

The 7800GT/GTX doesn't use a great deal of power, nor does the AMD CPU you'll be getting. 480W is plenty for pretty much everything except P4-EE's with SLI ATI graphics cards.

All the PSU manufacturers use different measuring techniques so the only use the db levels they quote are when comparing two PSU's from the same manufacturer.


The principle of what you say sounds right, but I was let to understand (I think I read it on overclockers) that the units currently in the market place did not reflect this. A case of practice over-ridding theory.

For my needs the most important thing is that it has enough power for the eventual RAID stack, PPU and overclocking and isn't ludicrously expensive. Lighting is only secondary, and noise just a tertiarry consideration.

www.quietpc.com know their stuff.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the # of Watt alone doesn't tell all either.

Some 350W powersupplies are 'better' than a 420W, just to name one -- in addition to the Watt's, you also have the max. drain on the 5 volt line, 12 volt line, and max. sustained power. A powersupply with a lower total wattage can beat a higher one in some of these areas, making them 'better'. A good 350W supply beats a mediocre 420W. (Now, these would be too light-weight for what you're planning, but the same goes for the higher Watt powersupplies as well. Just because the Watt-rating is higher on a particular supply, doesn't actually mean it's usable to you)

exactly, quality is where it's at. I got mine from quietpc.com, most expensive PSU I've ever had but it runs 2
fat SATAs, CD-ROM, DVD-RW, Audigy External Box, P4 3.2, Radeon 9800XT, extra case fans etc whereas my last "high Watts" PSU didn't cut the mustard.

Can't remember what I bought but it wasn't cheap. I know I was very picky when deciding what to feed my 3700+ and 7800GTX :)

The Eye-T one will do the job, but your all still missing the most important bit:

Cool: Eye-T

Not Cool: Generic

Sure there are other cool PSU's around, but I have to pick one of them right? I dont really understand the depth of debate actually unless somebody is saying there's something wrong with this choice?

I think I found my perfect case now btw, but i'm yet to find a retail outlet for it only a distributor in Korea. It's a totally transparent (polycarbonate lexan I guess) case styled like the new look Volkswagon Beetle :) How cool is that?

There is. From what I can tell, it doesn't have detachable cables. Buying a PSU because it has blue lights on it is the wrong reason. A blue led or cold cathode tube costs like 5 bucks, so you might aswell get a good PSU (like the A.C.Ryan I mentioned earlier).

Pretty cool. That means you can airbrush the inside, and not have to worry about getting scratches on it. Got linkage?

Banshee, why not take OEJs advice and at least go read quiet pc com, or http://www.silentpcreview.com/ (my personal favourite of the two)? You can learn sooooooo much by just reading the stuff it says at those two.

After that you'll know lots and lots of things. Happens to nearly everyone that goes there.

Glowing lights get old/annoying very quickly.

bling!

I cant agree LED's aren't worth having - it's just that you guys lack the imagination to use them properly in your butched up cases with air scoops and what not... :)

My plan, should I manage to get the case I want, is to make a hippied up (paint scheme) love bug (VW Beetle) that has underfloor lighting like the boy racers with their nitros kits etc. If the case is polycarb as I suspect, then I can paint it using that spray stuff from the model shop that radio control car users use.

I havn't found a retailer yet to check price but i've found this memory which would be pretty cool if I can afford it and it fits:
http://www.corsair.com/corsair/products/specs/TWINXP1024-3200XL.pdf perhaps accompanied by a secondary set of LED topped (showing RAM usage) sticks to get me to my 2gb target...

Admit it, that's style! You guys your happy with your beige cases and wear jeans everyday... *boggle*


In regards noise, the fans kick in when the temperature is up and the motherboard I have chosen underclocks and overclocks based on system load and temperature, so it's not as if it'll be kicking out full heat unless i'm inside a game and in which case i've got a lovely pair of giant Wharfdales sitting on my desk that will be happy to mask an average volume AMD equipped PC, which is the beauty of living in a detached house and having your own office...

I've not found a retailer yet, only a distributor in Korea. I've mailed them asking for a UK outlet and hope to hear back tommorow (it isn't Christmas for Buddists right?). So i'll get back to you on that.

I don't see the argument against quiet psu's. A quiet psu is one that has a tremendously good conversion efficiency... in short it's a BETTER psu.

Guys you gotta understand, she's a girl and all girls do in spare time with spare money is redecorate. They all want to be interior designers so she has to have a cool computer to fit in with her furniture, room colour and windows.

All this talk about upgrading is making me think do i need an upgrade. Not really, but maybe i could, just to feel better about myself. Or a new guitar.

banshee: "i've got a lovely pair of giant Wharfdales sitting on my desk"

I got some of them too, but they are wall mounted and as close as I could make them to audio decoupled from the wall.

They are great speakers - this is because they are old fashioned and have very large magnets - I don't know of a model in the wharfdale range that is magnetically sheilded though so it's worth bearing in mind that they could easily wreak total havoc if they were too near your computer or a crt monitor.

Computer's not on the desk too perchance, is it? ;O) I'm guessing the monitor can't be a CRT?

Give noise a consideration. My old comp, a dual PIII Dell made so much noise that I usually avoided turning it on. It doesn't have to be exteremely complicated or expensive to get a reasonably quiet system.

My current one makes a low hum that you hardly notice, even after playing games or running 3D software for a good while. I got an AMD box, as those currently use less power than P4s and thus make less heat. I got a case that I'd read was reasonably quiet and put in a GeForced 6800 card that made tons of noise. Then I replaced the fan on the graphics card with a quiet Zalman one that made almost no noise and cooled the graphics card better than the original one. Swapped the case fan with a silent one as the one I got with the case was unable to run at low voltage. And finally put the harddisk in a sliencing box inside the computer, which got rid of the whining noise it was making....by that time the system was so quiet that the hard drive noise was starting to annoy me. :-)

You can get a very nice and quiet system, by simply replacing a few fans here and there and choosing the right cabinets. You don't need to go for watercooling.

Watercooling can end up more noisy than air-cooling. The heat you are extracting from your CPU has to go somewhere, and it's usually an external radiator+fan.

The only watercooling I would consider is the Zalman one that comes with a weird blue heatsink tower. Honestly though, the mantra with watercooling has to be "when it leaks, can I afford to replace everything?". It will leak at some point.

I've got 4 wharfdales, 2 in front and 2 behind, great for games.

VP: Your sig is now hideous, it makes me want to puke :-D

The Wharfdales are currently roughly 12 inches either side of my monitor, which is currently a CRT. The PC is on the floor at the moment.

If I get the car case i'm going to re-arrange and put the PC next to the iMac...


...this would be the iMac I recently stripped down to part level and rebuilt just so that I could put on a funky polka dotted cover from a broken Dalmation unit.

I have the same arrangement with a 19" CRT, needless to say my desk is BIG!

My Office

Nice mug. btw, I found that PC cases with the case ON are cooler than with the case off because the air can funnel through the structure more effectively in the designed manner. I tested this in the summer with that SpeedFan app that also measures temps.

With a good airflow design yes, but my current machine overheats within 10 minutes of having the case on - it's fairly black and white. The problem is my second hard disk which is overheating and unfortunately it's located too close to the air intake fan.

It's a heavy & noisy 15 year old server full tower case, and it's going to be scrapped... ! :)

Personally, I've never come across a PC where this is true, no matter how well designed the internal airflow is.

Oh, well added extra fans to mine so maybe that helped? Plus it was located in a computer desk CPU slot thing, i.e. a small box so I think airflow with case off was a bit rubbish.

Becky: Nice carpet!


*snigger*

I quite like it actually, it's got class, more than your HIDEOUS sig ;-)

It wouldn't be my choice of carpet actually, although it fits the decor of the room well for now. I'm going to decorate my bedroom next so the office has a long wait until I get a nice plain burgandy carpet in the there to match what I would like to put on the walls.

For now it's only decorated in my mind...

I posted this pic of the most revered part of my office before:

That technicolour mess is why I keep mine out of sight...

Blimey, GA - I forsee a car boot sale on the horizon. :P

You bought Driver. I almost died laughing when I saw that amongst such greats as GTA, Civilization, Thief etc.

to my credit, I didn't play it much, it was hyped at the time and I grabbed it but didn't get into it too much.

Becky: To me that mess is a thing of beuty, years or classic games (mainly FPS)! Of course I've got more that I uh borrowed yeah that's it plus those new fangled modern ones in the tiny boxes (thank god).

It gets worse. He bought Daikatana, and to add insult to injury, it's sitting next to Descent 3! Heresy!

Although I probably shouldn't be the one to talk. I bought Star Wars Galaxies.

I liked Star Wars Galaxies. There was a distinct absense of decent MOO clones at the time.

FD: I bought Daikatana even though I knew it was gonna be rubbish cos I just had to find out after played all the other FPSs, and actually it was a bit fiddly on the first "world" but got better after than. As for Descent 3, well I played 1 and 2 all the way through (coop as well!) and 3 was frankly OK, so don't dis it, Gamespot gave it 9.0 which is a formidable score. Anyway instead of focusing on the potential bummers, LOOK at all the amazing classics there, hardly ar bad egg anywhere cos I read reviews. Such an easy thing to do, reading reviews, but boy did it pay off! I've even got that weird ass french game Outcast, was pretty cool actually. All the FPS games are shown in chronological order and I've finished them all.

I wasn't dissing it. I think the Descent games where cool. I was commenting on the rather poor judgement call of putting it next to Diakatana. :o>

aha, I thought you might hace meant that but it's so hard to tell from reading without verbal inflections sometmes, don't you think?

Unfortunately there is no way to turn them *off* in most cases.

Especially inside a powersupply, you have to consider the following:
a. You have bright blue LED's
2. You have a moving plastic fan in front of them
iii. You end up with a blue flashing flicker reflecting off your walls, always in your peripheral vision, much like a dieing florescent tube.

Sure, there is the initial 'oooooh'-factor when you first see the rig itself, but especially if you spend any time behind the system in question, it gets annoying real quickly.

I had to replace a fan in my own system a while back, and chose to pay extra to *not* have any LED's on it, for exactly that reason.
(The lighted versions were cheaper than the normal ones. Imagine that.)

And especially if you are also considering a window & blue neon tubing in the side of your computer itself: Do you -really- want a blue hue that's always present at the edge of your vision?

OK, blue LEDs, I have a Subaru Impreza Turbo 2000 (modified), but I DON'T have blue LEDs poking out the Intercooler intake or round the bottom of the car. The only cars that have these LEDs are Vauxhaul Corsas or hideously modified Vauxhal Astras, i.e. cheap as sh*t, blinged up, horrid cards with now real power. So becky, just get a decent system, no bling and relish the power in an understated case ...

Your missing the point by several country miles, and possibly a continent. I'm not getting an Aston Martin case, i'm getting a Herbie. Mind you that's only if I can find a retailer which currently I can't :(

It's fun to start reading threads like this one after they've stewed for a few days...