The purpose of your mouse? For simple use like light gaming, web surfing and the like any cheap optical mouse will do.

For slightly better performance in games get a low end gaming mouse with a higher DPI such as the Razer Krait.

For extreme gamers or those who run various kinds of software that require plenty of mouse usage, get something with a high DPI and a few extra customizable buttons.

I can sell that and buy an apartment in the suburbs.

5870 is comparable to ATIs own 4870x2. Which means it is better than the GTX 285 and yet slightly behind the GTX 295 on occasions.

5850 is almost exactly on par with the GTX 285.

Xigmatek does offer good value on their PSUs, but better brands exist if you have the money. Both OCZ and Corsair are the main choice of hardcore enthusiasts looking for the best of the best. And who can discount the legendary PC Power and Cooling?

As for casings, I feel that Cooler Master does offer the best bang for buck ones on the market. Their HAF series provides the best airflow and cooling performance among a majority of competitors who often price their products at a much higher premium. Though it can be said, the looks of both aforementioned cases don't appeal to all and the lack of filters in the HAF 932 is just disgraceful.

I don't always trust Wikipedia, but here they do provide some good info about RAID configurations.

Lol.

Well, first let's start with RAID 0, or data striping. What it does is it distributes the data that you write to it, or read from it, over two separate HDDs effectively boosting both read and write speeds. Take for example you are writing a 100MB file to your HDD. With a RAID 0 configuration, your system will write 50MB to one HDD and the other 50MB to the second HDD. The one problem with this is data security. Should one disk fail, you will lose all your data.

RAID 1 is for redundancy and is also called data mirroring. Unlike RAID 0, it offers no performance boosts. What it does instead is it will write the theoretical 100MB file I mentioned above to both your HDDs. This means that even if there is a failure of a single HDD, you still have a perfect back-up in the form of your second, mirrored drive.

RAID 10, or 1+0, does what its name suggests. It will first mirror data, then stripe it to two HDDs. Mind you this requires a grand total of four HDDs but affords you the performance of a RAID 0 configuration and the redundancy of RAID 1.

RAID 0+1 or RAID 01 practically does the same thing, with it striping data before mirroring, as the name suggests.

RAID 5 and 6 are called data striping with parity and frankly they are quite complicated to understand. But the performance you can gain here is minimal as compared to the aforementioned four other RAID arrays. One thing they do offer above all else is good read speeds, lousy writes and somewhat decent redundancy.

Did that answer your question?

This post has been edited by Loki[D.d.G]: Oct 26 2009, 08:32 PM

Eh? I thought PSUs are supposed to take cool air in from the bottom of the case and exhaust it immediately out the back? I can't seeing any PSUs with a top vent before. It's always on the side.

Which means you will install fan side down with the exhaust vent towards the provided slot in your case as per the picture below. Though note that the case in question has a PSU mount on top instead.

Fishsticks! Note to self; don't post anything for at least one hour after waking up. My bad.

Thermal paste acts as a seal to aid heat transfer between your CPU and heatsink. The better the thermal paste, the better the heat transfer and the cooler your CPU will run. Some heatsinks come with thermal paste pre-applied and if you notice, they almost always use a very thin layer. Using too much would act as an insulator and this will make temps rocket sky high. So, a couple of drops would do the trick nicely.

Then your expensive heatsink would be rendered next to useless.

Quite a few differences to list down. Why not head over to the Hard Disk thread for more info?