I've been pondering the internet and I want to jump ship from my computer within in the next couple of months. That way I haven't got to rush into buying my new parts and I can still make some money from my computer.

I started by looking at what I can upgrade on my computer first. Like a 8800 in place of my 7800GT, but the 8800 requires a new PSU that has 2x PCI-e connectors. After that I will want to upgrade my CPU in a few months and that will mean a new motherboard due to the shortage of Socket 939 CPU's.

So to cut all the fuss I can going to buy all new hardware basicly. Here is the list I have so far:

Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gaming case - The reason I have chosen that is my cases airflow is rubbish and hot air just doesn't escape. I have also been reading some reviews on it and there all pretty positive about the case, no real big faults.

OCZ GameXStream 700w - I've picked that because it's got 2 PCI-E connectors for the 8800 GTS. The one review I had read about it so far seems positive and if graphics cards get any more power hungry then I should be safe with that. If there is a better one to pick I'm all ears.

OcUK 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 Dual Channel Kit - Yes I know your all going to say that I'll be better with PC2-8000 Ram that costs 2, 3 hundred pound but I'm not going to be overclocking the new system any time soon so cheap ram should do while I try and patch the hole I would've made buying this all.

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB - I was going to get the GTX, but I reckon it will take at least a year before the GTS will get properly tested, at that point the GTX or whatever is out then would've dropped a 100 pound or so.

Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 - I was going to go with the 6700 but the £200 jump is a bit too much, and I heard pretty good views on this CPU. I'm sure if I needed the extra power it could be OC to something like the 6700.

Asus P5N32-E SLi nForce 680 - Something else I'm not too great on, motherboards. If it was AMD then I would find it alot easier, but I've never brought parts for a Intel system before so I don't how good that motherboard is or if there's a better one for the same sort'a price. All I know is that it must have PCI-E x16 twice for SLI if I ever choose that route.

Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit OEM - I actually quite liked the beta's and as my system is inclined to Direct X 10 then it's a obvious choice.

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound (3.5g) - I don't honestly know anything about thermal glues, I've only picked that because it's talked about alot. If someone could tell me what it does, where it's put and the idea of it I would greatly appreciate it.

The above system will come to about £1,107.87 inc VAT in total from Overclockers.co.uk and that is my max budget. Like I said this will be brought over time, Case first then maybe the PSU etc till I only have the main parts like the CPU, graphics card, Ram and motherboard. I'm hopeing that way I can put my wages in the bank as I spend them, rather then buy it all at once and have no money for a while.

I will be using my Hard Drives, Floppy and CD-rom drive and other cards (Tv, sound etc) from my computer I'm using now.
If you can think of anything else I will need or anything that needs adjusting (a part or maybe upgrade something) please leave a post.

I'm using Arctic Silver 3, never had problems with it. I've seen (very old by now) reviews of AS vs other compounds and it usually wins. Very noticeably better than the thick white stuff that was commonplace 5 years ago.

You mention a CPU and thermal paste, but not a cooler? Or are you sticking to the stock cooler? I'm assuming it ships with one.

What CAS latency is that memory? It's really worth getting the low latency memory if you're going DDR2. 5 is normal for cheap stuff, 4 is better, 3 is great but often comes at a premium.
I would click the link but my net is acting very weird, I can only load lfsforum.net and en.wikipedia.org. Everything else instantly times out. So basically my surfing habits will remain unchanged but still very puzzling.

AS5 can be had for a fiver, i HEARTILY advice it, as well as a slightly better cooler "just to be sage"

I'm hopeing the CPU comes with a stock fan. I will be adding new coolers on things over time aswell as better ram. I just want to get the big parts together and running, earn more money and upgrade things when I can.

The case has 2 120mm fans at the front, 200mm fan at the top of the case, 1 at the back plus the PSU fan, aswell as another 2 fan I can add to it. I'm hopeing that will do for now until I get some more money together.

My main concern is the PSU and Motherboard and weather it's all compatable with one-another.

Both the mobo and the PSU are good, that mobo is ok mobo to have for a Core 2 Duo, although i didn't know it was SLi?

If you want to know which mobo to buy, then check this FAQ - it's pretty helpful!

why go for vista home, if your gonna get vista mate you might as well spend on it and buy ultimate.....

i uswe artic silver top stuff, highly recommended mate, asus mobo's are good boards and iv had a quick look over and the board looks ok for what you are wanting... cpu's usually come with a stock cooler in the box...

the case looks a little like the thermaltake armor.. now thats a case worth buying....

oh and nice choise of gfx card

Quote from niffer022 :

why go for vista home, if your gonna get vista mate you might as well spend on it and buy ultimate.....

That was the original plan till I looked here to see that Premium had the whole fancy look Aero theme and Window Media Center which is all I really want. Ultimate only seems to have stuff I would never use and a bigger price tag.

Quote from seggons :

That was the original plan till I looked here to see that Premium had the whole fancy look Aero theme and Window Media Center which is all I really want. Ultimate only seems to have stuff I would never use and a bigger price tag.

ah never new that, cheers for link.. means i dont have to save up £350 for the full edition now whoo hooo

Quote from Jakg :

Both the mobo and the PSU are good, that mobo is ok mobo to have for a Core 2 Duo, although i didn't know it was SLi?

If you want to know which mobo to buy, then check this FAQ - it's pretty helpful!

The motherboard has 2 16x PCI-E slots on it, but your link might perswade me to pay an extra £20 and get this board.
I donno, I'll have to do some more reading up on it.

crikey, £177 for a mobo? you don't even pay that for a damn DFi Venus

i only paid £60 for mine, and i love it

Quote from niffer022 :

ah never new that, cheers for link.. means i dont have to save up £350 for the full edition now whoo hooo

Save even more money by buying the OEM version of it unless you like paying £132.78 for a fancy manual and a box?

Note: If you do go for the OEM version pick the right one. Retail Vista has 32 and 64-bit on the same DVD, but the OEM you have to pick which DVD you want.

I've amended the first post to a better motherboard. Although there doesn't seem to be any reviews out there for it I am going to go with it because:

- It is Quad Core ready
- It has 3 PCI-E slots (2 at 16x speed and 1 at 8x speed)
- It looks more feature full
- It appeals to me more and looks more "future proof".

I may start to order it this weekend hopefully if all looks good.

Be careful about the nvidia 680 chipset. I've heard they have some problems. Do some research. Otherwise, the parts you have listed look fine.

Also note that the board only has 1 IDE channel, so if your old hard drive(s) is/are PATA and not SATA, you are limited to: 1 PATA hard drive and 1 PATA CD/DVD drive, or 2 PATA hard drives and 1 SATA CD/DVD drive (which are still pretty rare these days, and relatively expensive). Combine that with the fact that the 2 drives will have to be VERY close together.

If the old drives are SATA, then you're fine.

The air cooler everyone is talking about now (for the Core2Duo) is the Tuniq Tower. It is not really expensive (Here is one at OcUK) and can get you some very high clocks. Many hit 3Ghz easy (Some up to 3.6 on air) with a setup similar to yours without producing too much noise. The only problem might be finding one in stock as they sell out pretty quickly, should just take a quick look around though.

Otherwise, you picked a very good selection of parts, you will definitely be happy with the performance, C2D's are amazing at the moment.

the Tuniq Tower is great, but hard to find - a Big Typhoon isn't as good, but much easier to get

You've certainly done your homework and thiose parts are looking good, shame about not overclocking though as they'd go hard I'd probably recommend the Coolermaster Stacker 830 over the nine hundred, there's been some issues with the nine hundred and it's very open and loud.

Check out the Scythe Ninja for cpu cooling, it's similar to the tuniq tower but should be more available.

I take back what I said about the NVIDIA 680i chipset. The problem was with data corruption on SATA, but apparently it was fixed a few weeks ago with a BIOS update.

Just make sure you have the latest BIOS and you should be set.

yup, the bios update was released a week ago, i know one person who had to reinstall FIVE times in a week due to the bug

i think you are not making a good choice.

the difference in gaming performance between the e6600 and the e6400 is less than 3%, and costs about 50% (?) more...

the difference in performance between the GS and the GTX is ~40% (3Dmark06) or ~50% (rise of nations).

in other words, if you got the GTX and a lesser conroe, you would have a faster gaming machine. (possibly having spent less money, not sure about the prices)

if you want a blazing fast pc (and for that much money i think you are aiming that way) you need to spend less $$$ on the cpu and use it to buy twin raptors for stripping.

Dunno about you but I'd see someone else strip rather than raptors hehe

RAID is overrated and twin raptors are a huge waste of money. You're better off with just one raptor, but unless you really want loading times to be that few secodns quicker the raptor is good, otherwise a 320GB drive is cheaper and bigger.

It's also easier to upgrade graphics card later, might as well get the better cpu and if ever overclocking the 6600 goes very hard, harder than a 6400.

you use twin raptors because with such fast memory and cpu systems, the bottleneck is the storage.

one must always try to make faster, that which is the slowest in the pc...

if you have a gf6200, for example, there is no point using a quadcore cpu, right? you will go to a 6800gt or something... and if you have an 64 2800+, there is not much point going from a 8800gts to a gtx... i always try to power up what makes the system go slow. from what i see, for our friend's pc, it would be a better choice *for gaming* to get the GTX instead of the GTS and the 6400 instead of the 6600 (i would go for the 6300 in fact! and get a better cooling with the money to make it silent).

and twin raptors (either stripped (throughput) or mirrored (latency)) are the fastest, this side of ultra expensive 15K scsi drives (cheetah) with $500 scsi controllers...

that is what i think.

Just to let you know, I'll be using my 2 SATA Hard Drives from the computer I'm on now so I don't have to get another one ... for now .

A couple of hours ago the Ram got me thinking. What's the point in getting 2 GB of cheap ram when I'm going to upgrade it again when I've got the money?
So my line of thinking was why don't I just get 1 GB of cheap ram just to tide me over for a month or 2 and put the money I've saved to one side until I have enough money to get a decent pair of 1 GB sticks.

What do you think?

get 1 1GB stick. with it you can have a usable system and later you can get another one stick...

Anyone who compares hardware based upon 3DMark scores has no idea what the hell they're talking about.

Yes, the GTX is about 30-50% faster than the GTS in most game benchmarks when run alongside the fastest CPU currently available at the highest resolution possible (2560x1600) with all settings cranked up. It also happens to cost 50% more.

However, Davo brings up a good point that the video card is a little easier to upgrade than the CPU. Also, the 8800 series is the FIRST generation of DX10 cards, and probably won't run DX10 games all that well. So, why not get a decent card now and upgrade later when you need the power since, right now, the GTS is plenty powerful enough.

Also, with LFS being more CPU dependent, you'll see a nice jump in minimum framerate in LFS with the faster CPU. I confirmed this myself when I overclocked my E6400 to 3.2 GHz, a 50% increase in clock speed. Guess how much my minimum framerate increased. Yep, you guessed it, 50%.

ok, whatever... i gave my advice. regardless, it is very impolite to say "has no idea what the hell they're talking about."