You're correct in understanding what a bottleneck means. However, bottlenecks are caused by bandwidth latencies between parts, which forces some to slow down and play 'catch up' with others. Your CPU is good for cards upto the level of the 8600GTS, since beyond that, the card's bandwidth requirements would be much higher and you'd experience some bottlenecking.

Well thank you again Rage I can now enjoy this card. Getting a new PSU and tower to fit it in should not be to much grief for a newbie. Now I'm going to check out this new Everest program, hehe.

Developments, developments...

Hey Rage, this upgrading has been crazyyy. I got hold of my Dad's 8600 GTS and I found he had a SB XFi Elite Pro soundcard, which I was given aswell. After we plugged them in the motherboard and turned on the PC, things didn't go according to plan:S The PC did not really turn on, a light (I'm sure a diagnostic light) on the back of the PSU, was switching on and off rapidly making a clicking sound.

At first we thought this would be down to the PSU developing a fault. I especially thought so after what you had explained to me. I had put in a Soundcard aswell, lol! One thing we did do was take out a Wi-Fi card and Internal Modem that came as part of the original model. This I think would've alleviated some of the PSU usage to compensate for the new GPU card and sound card. Anyway, we think we damaged the PSU or motherboard, while using a compressed air duster, or the motherboard short-circuiting somewhere along the line.

But it didn't end on a bad note. I just said, "F*** it, let's just transfer my hard drive to his old PC!" Everything seems to work fine, I'm using Vista now, with his old hard drive as the C:\ drive and my hardrive as a backup drive. That's 2x 250GB drives now.

All I've been dealing with today is just trying to get my head around Vista, deleting unwanted data and reorganising material. I'm not sure why, but Vista seems slower. Maybe it's the fancy graphics, maybe it's the huge amount of data off my second drive (F:\Program Files) that I've got to get rid of. I'm not sure if Vista will grow on me..

Lastly, I've a couple of quick questions, if you can help

Do you think that storing downloads( DivX movies, music) and important documents on the 2nd drive will be of any other benefit apart from the security of a backup. I would like to know if having the 2 drives slows things down. They're both of 7,200 rpm, but will files read/be accessed slower off the 2nd drive??

Also, I don't know if you use Vista, but I'm also trying to find the equivalent of the C:\ Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu folder, so that I can delete redundant items off the Start Menu. Bascially, I can't find a Start Menu folder in C:\Users folder of MS Vista. The version of Vista is Ultimate.

Thanks again..

No there will be no other benefit of having a second drive separately but there'll be no performance loss since each drive will be on its own separate channel, assuming they're SATA drives. Put them together in RAID though, and you'd have a much faster solution, although it'd halve your space.
As for the Vista question, I have no idea. You're gonna ask someone else for that.

Just had a look in the Device Manager and these are the exact drives:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...0000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US&reqPage=Support

&

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1028&p_created=1056565574

Is it possible to put these drives into RAID configuration then?

New Nvidia 9600 I think, for PCIE looks to be a smaller 1 slot affair, and not too spendy

Nah, better save RAID for two identical drives. Your current configuration will be okay for now.

Cheers mate.