haha! many many lols! No mine is more 'pure neglect' than 'mad scientist'! Were you running it like that or were u just draining it in the pic? Watercooling seems more popular than ever these days with all these Gpu's and mem modules all ready to go, u still fluid-cooled now? Also was trying to work out what that GPU was, is that some kind of cooling unit strapped on?! Couldnt decide whether that was a temperature sensor or Voltmeter thingy bottom right too... If that was a few years ago then u clearly know your stuff!

As for my machine things still seem a little off and I want to sort the basics before I head on into the Bios with clock-speeds on my mind:) I found out that Epic and Nvidia released a specific driver to combat various issues in UT3 (stuttering being a common one) which was the 169.28 beta. Didnt really help, just re-introduced some tearing in GoW, though I guess my settings in Rivatuner could have reset. On one of the UT forums someone mentioned one possible cause of the stutter could be multiple cores and suggested disabling all but one to solve it. I may give this a go but it kinda defeats the point running it at 2.4ghz:(

Also on my to-do list is a Bios update and you mentioned Asus live update or something. In the past I've hated Bios updates as it usually involves a floppy disc and potential danger- and now I have no FDD at all (though Im guessing I may not need one)... will have to check this out.

Seems like there are many possible problems and solutions for me to explore and its bugging me now. Someone should start a technical support service specifically for gaming machines as im pretty sure alot of the PC maintainence people round here wouldn't be able to help me. I'd pay good money to have this machine running at its peak but I guess its another learning process I'll benefit from doing myself.

Ill pop a pic up of my old dustbucket when I can get my hands on a Cam, if i can handle the shame! I treat my machines alot better now honest guv! (at one point I pulled out a collection of bottle caps, a full box of matches and various items from inside old machine!)

Nah i'm not watercooled anymore.

That gfx card was a Geforce Ti4200 - think I still have #1 spot on 3dmark air cooled athlon xp - lol. Was quite into all the nerdiness in my teens, ran a custom r532a prometeia for a while (which is now slowly rotting in the loft - all £880 of it). Stil lhave my water cooling stuff up there too but none of the cpu blocks will fit anymore as the sockets have changed. Could still water cool the gpu and motherboard though I suppose.

Currently run a scythe infinity (now called mugen) heatsink with 2 low rpm 120mm fans and a modified bolt through mount with backplate (it was getting crap pressure with the intel push pins), other than that its a standard pc. Now that I spend all day working on PCs the last thing I want to do is get home and mess about with mine . TF2 innit!

Regards your remaining issues, I still think they'd all go away if you went to a 32bit OS (even 32bit vista at a push). Nvidia driver support for vista 64 is rubbish! The only good thing is its better than ATI's .

Yeah man good advice thanks. my next bit of expenditure will prob be a cheap OEM copy of Vista32 for £80 or so maybe. Closely followed by 4GB of patriot's finest DDR2-800 low latency ram for £120 (from yoyotech). If I was sure my mobo could take it I'd just get 2GB of 1066, but not sure if it will work. After that i may be swapping my HD for a couple of Raptor drives in a raid array (been a good high speed HD solution for a long time now) as I just finished a Defrag on the 500GB drive 6 HOURS LATER and only 150gb full! (yawn).

As for the psu, ACMW (the company behind the Interweb company i bought the base unit from), have been pretty understanding when I told them my 12v rail was down some- i also mentioned my GPU's were running hot and once I've filled in their tech report form they said it may not be necessary to send my whole machine- i have been hinting heavily for a 1000watter as that was quoted to me by the sales lady and maybe i can just do a straight swap.

As for this beta driver I cant decide whether it has enhanced some things and slowed down others... im getting a few brief pauses i GoW which I would usually associate with load times, but Ill roll back and see if there really is any change. The problem with not having control over the extra GPU fans etc remains, though I've not yet tried the ATI tool. Hopefully in my search I will find a program to give me readings from both cards and some kind of overall GPU health-check, though I'm not holding my breath as SLi support is still totally crap.

Am beginning to wonder about the plasticy smell that I assumed was just a new system and PSU. It does seem to be eminating from the psu (perhaps backing up your concerns about Thermaltake) and I assumed it was just that 'new PC smell' but we will see. If anything goes horribly wrong I am safe in the fact I have done very little to alter the machine and the lady on the phone even thought adding cooling would not invalidate any warantee.

But it runs TF2 well... so many of you may ask what I am complaining about! Even the most problematic builds of my own have usually been sorted in this amount of time so heres hoping a new OS, PSU and maybe some memory gives me the performance I'd hoped, and payed for.

many thanks... Dan