The i7 950 based system is probably a better choice for you. If you wait a little while you should see a drop in prices as the sandy bridge chips come out, so you can buy the i7 950 system in a couple/few months time and save yourself a bit of money (or lightly upgrade other parts of the system). With a decent heatsink you should get 4+ GHz which will be fast enough for anything you want to do just now and should easily last you a few years.
I'm not thinking of overclocking it in the immediate future (because I'm relatively n00b), but if I did do so it would be minor and well below the harjun industry standard of 1.675 THz
I'm tempted by the option of liquid cooling for an extra £59, but it probably isn't neccessary unless I do choose to overclock.
Hopefully decent fan cooling should be keep temperatures down sufficiently. The only reassuring thing is that it can't possibly be as bad as my 90°C Vaio laptop which subsequently self destructed itself.
here is mine ^^:
Manufacturer: None (Custom build setup)
Processor: AMD Phenom X4 Quad Core @ 2.2 Ghz (each core)
Power Supply: Thermaltake PurePower 500 watts
Fans: 4x120mm Antec Blue LED fan, 1x120mm on the thermaltake power supply, 1x200mm Antec on the top, 1x80mm for the processor and 1x30mm integrated to my graphic card, for a total of 8 fans
Memory: 6GB DDR2
Hard Drive: Two Internal, one of 640GB, another of 200GB and one external of 500GB for a total of 1.3 Terabyte
Video Card: ATI Radeon Sapphire HD 5550 (contain a DVI, VGA, HDMI plug)
TV Card: Got one but I dont know the model
Monitor: 2 monitor, 1x16:9 of 19" from Samsung, 1x4:3 of 18" from Sony
Sound Card: Dont know :/ but its a 7.1 channel
Speakers/Headphones: Logitech Z-2300 as sound system and Sony MDR-XD200 as headphone
Keyboard: HP SK-2960
Mouse: Logitech M305
Operating System: Windows 7 Family Edition 64bits
Motherboard: Acer RS780HVF
Computer Case: Antec 900 Ultimate Gamer Case
here some pic: (click on the image to see it in full size)
i have the same case. i can only set the fans on low. anything higher and my pc will over heat due to the air being moved too fast. you don't even hear them when they're that low.
My Pc isnt noisy even wirh 8 fan they produce like 20Db and its not more noisy thann my other old setup with 3 fans, you would be surprised :P the only time its get noisy its when I put my 4 ajustable fans to the maximum speed, but i will do that. only if im playing at a game that require all the performance of my system ( which wont happen I think LOL) but whatever its a really quiet system
Motherboard: ASUS M3A78-EM CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (stock @ 3.2GHz for the moment) Heatsink: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus RAM: OCZ 2*1GB + 2*2GB Corsair DDR2 800
Graphics: Integrated (Radeon HD 3200)
Case: In-Win MicroATX HDD: WD 2TB Caviar Green
PSU: 400W
Running very fast and very cool. The board isn't fantastic and it's running DDR2, which will knock an edge off the performance. Few random pics attached.
Whoops, I forgot to include a screenshot from HW Monitor. Added them to post above now. Yeah, when I first saw the (inaccurate) core temps reported by CoreTemp/AMD OverDrive I was amazed because I thought they were accurate and wondered how that was even possible (< ambient on air cooling). Seems like quite a few of the voltages are displaying way out...dunno if that's a sensor issue or if the PSU is playing up. I'd have thought that if they were accurate things would have been going wrong by now.
I found it annoying also that amd overdrive shows temperatures wrong even though its designed for their chips. The average is around 10 - 12C lower than the actual cpu temp, so stll 23-25C. I do like the 1090T seems to run quite cool compared to other chips too.
Computer case is ugly old mATX, hardware inside:
Corsair 400W PSU
MSI K9VGM-V motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (slight overclock)
Mushkin 2x1Gb DDR2 800 memory
Gigabyte Radeon HD 6850 1024 GPU.
Gonna update hardware later, expect the GPU.
Steering wise, Logitech G25 and as a handbrake old Logitech joystick.
And a new screen, which is actually a telly, LG 32" LCD TV, it's main resolution is only 1360x768 but I still love driving sims with it.
Friend of mine gave me a asus ah4670 512ddr3 graphics card for a little boost over the geforce 7600gt .
The Q6600 core 2 quad is now sitting at 3ghz (9 x 334) stable at around 25oc idle, fan speed 1000rpm. I am pritty sure i will be able to get the Q6600 to 3.4ghz on air with the cooler i have maybe a little more but this will be tested later.
Like I said in the post, it works as a handbrake. Nowadays it has become it's only job. When I was younger I used to play all kinds of flying sims too, but I never got in to them in the way I have done with sim racing.