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"Ah computers... a pain"

I've been looking int ocomputers and looking up motherboards, graphics cards.. and all i find on boards is... ATI rules, nvidia rules, and moaning about their own built computers not working okay its bound to happen... but also all they can talk about after making their machines finally work is overclocking, i dont care about it at all i should ignore it but why is the majority who started off with puny computers all of a sudden not happy with what they originally have.
I am not against people overclocking but all i want is to read about people's opinion of components and not how they overclock!

Apparently not any more. The EPoX is supposed to be more stable and comes with VDD up to 2v out of the box, and the MOSFETs hardly even get warm now.

ABIT boards are supposed to be the don for overclocking. Admittedly, they don't come with a jazzy LED that tells you your POST result :O/

It depends what you need really. For Sniper, the Abit is the one to go for (although I doubt he'll use SATA anyway). For me however, it has to be 8RGA+, because for the overclocking options and onboard graphics For When It All Goes Wrong.

I would put the NF7-S above the EpoX, just for the onboard SATA controller. The onboard sound is very good - at least comparable to a SB Audigy. Don't ask me about it though - if I run it through my hifi the signal degrades because the hifi is naff, and if I run it from my headphones the headphone lead picks up noise :O/

Hm,. I doubt the onboard sound really is any good. If I were you I'd have chosen an EPoX 8RDA+ or 8RGA+, or an Abit NF7-S v1.2l. All three come with onboard NICs.

You can't have done much research at all. If you had, you'd have noticed that that motherboard already packs two NIC ports (do you really want a third?) and a very decent soundcard.

That all seems reasonable. Is that a deal or components you've chosen? Because case latter I'd change a few of them if I were you.

indeed after much research... i have gone for

AMD Athlon XP 2400 (2.0GHz)

ATX 400W Lian Li Midi Tower

Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard

512MB 333MHz DDR RAM

Maxtor 80GB DiamondMax Plus9

DVD-ROM Drive 16x Speed

CD Writer 52x/24x/52x

1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive

128MB DDR Radeon 9700 Pro AGP

Novatech PCI 10/100

Creative SndBlaster Audigy 2 Player

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

£1034 inc. VAT and DEL

Phil IS right, overclocking is really noticable, especially on certain AMD chips. You honestly telling me you wouldn't notice a 50% speed increase? Because that's what I've got.

Has to be said, and I'm sure Rob would agree, not overclocking these chips would be a crime. 133 > 180mhz fsb IS noticable..

But true, forums do tend to be full of people like that. I generally look around a bit for reviews - get an idea of a product I'm intereste din, then google for it and see what the general concensus is. Couple of decent review sites, the names of which escape me at the moment...

...Of course, you could always ask on here =)