Yeah i wholey recommend an SSD, you won't regret it

ooo its like a mini obsidian got the rubber grommets and the removable plate behind the cpu mounts. yeh.. sweet case, i 2nd it

Are you overclocking/tweaking this at all? Or just throw it together and turn it on? If youre prepared to tweak and clock a bit then there are only 2 choices - an i5 750 or an i7 920. With either cpu and the budget you have you will be looking at a 50% overclock (and cpu performance gain).

With what youve picked so far you could get an i7 - it'd be daft not to.

i7 920 can be had for £160 from a few places, decent boards are plentiful - gigabyte are particularly good. You can get an EX58 UD3R for £140 new (3 slots of ram, other than that great board), a DFI DK T3EH6 for £155 or an EX58A-UD3R (sata3, usb3 and 6 slots for memory) for about £160. Your 6gb of memory will be cheaper than the 8gb you were going to get as well. It'll work out about the same cost but WAY more powerful when built and tuned .

I really couldnt recommend the amd 6 core - its that cheap for a reason. The boards are not as user friendly, tweakable or stable at the same price point and the memory performance is downright shit. They dont cost £700 less than the 6 core intel cpu for no reason you know . Not even in the same league as the i7, its made to compete with the i3 and i5 series, not the i7. It can just about match an i5 750, but when you add some overclocking into the mix the i5 750 is capable of a 50% plus overclock and the AMD is capable of roughly 15%.

My personal choice (if I had to buy right now) would be something along these lines:

i7 920 £161
Thermalright ultra 120 £33
Gigabyte EX58A-UD3R £156
6GB Crucial Ballistix 1333mhz CL7 £120 (I have this ram and it does 2000mhz easy @9-9-9 settings )
ScanFX Radeon 5870 1gb £282
Silverstone Zeus Quad sli 850w £66 (Coolermaster GX750 for £70 also ok)
Coolermaster Elite 335 £24
1.5TB Samsung F2 £66
DVD-RW £17
3 x 120mm akasa smoke grey fans (case and cpu heatsink) £11
1 x fan clips thermalright ultra 120 £1
2 x sata leads £4

Total £941

All thats from http://www.scan.co.uk, though you will have to wait for your time to swoop on it ( http://www.todayonly.co.uk ). Its crap today (typically), but everything I have put on the list above is regularly on todayonly at the price above or lower. If you buy exactly what is listed above unless you are very unlucky with your cpu you should be able to get 4ghz or more from it. That will eat alive anything on the market short of the £850 i7 980x cpu. You would need the AMD hexacore overclocked to over 5ghz to get even comparable performance (and even the best ones are barely reaching 3.8ghz on air reliably so you can forget that ).

Snatchers has a very similar build (plus ssd, fancy motherboard and a shit hot case) and its not only quiet but monstrously powerful.

Trust this man he built mine and its sweet the only problem i have had is with windows install going weird once and bad gfx card drivers. Both out of his control though.

i have pretty much the same setup as what pilsy recommends there, apart from graphics card, mobo, and psu (although i'm upgrading to that psu when i get the funds) and it's fricking awesome.

I had never overclocked before i got my i7 and was surprised how simple it is. i managed it with relatively little fuss, and a bit of help from Pilsy, and i'm the person that fucked up installing new ram less than a year ago.

Up to you at the end of the day, but i have one rule when it comes to choosing stuff for my pc, and that's ask Pilsy.

Worth a read while we're all nattering about it...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gra ... ,2646.html

Apparently you could be crafty and get 2 x ATI 5770's in crossfire for about £120 each and get very close to the performance of a 5870 for 80-100 quid less dosh....interesting.

http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_ ... nce,2.html

Wouldnt dual the 5770's - the 5830 is £160 with 1120 shader cores. Two of those should give you a decent boost over a 5870 for very similar money.

If you're aiming at 5770 crossfire performance levels then get 3 x 4890 1gb cards and tri-fire them for the same price. The 4890 is faster than the 5770 anyway - ok you lose DX11 support, but really does that matter? 4890 is available for £95+ per card.

If youre going that way though then 2 x GTX275 for £175 a piece would blow the ATI offerings out the water in terms of performance. My 2 x gtx260 overclocked in the i7 @ 4.4ghz is faster than every review i've seen of the GTX480 and Radeon 5870. The GTX275 would be significantly faster (maybe 5-10fps or an AA level) again compared to my setup.

Radeon 4890 @ Novatech, Scan and Tekheads for under £100
Radeon 5830 @ Scan todayonly for £160
GTX275 @ ocuk clearance for £175

Whoa Nelly, I'm now a confused bear lol...

Ok - I'm probably not gonna be overclocking cos I don't trust myself to do it and not mess it up at all - Like seriously, I'd rather steer clear cos I can't risk messing up a component lol - that's sorta why I ended up leaning towards the X6 rather than an i5 or i7.

Kinetik has sorted me out a pretty good bundle so probably gonna go with that - sorry if I sound ungrateful now i asked for help and am now no longer needing it - he spent all day yday trying to get me good deals on parts etc from his suppliers

That screen looks pretty awesome , might have to wait a few weeks for that tho, this new pc's gonna pretty much wipe me out til i do some more work

*edit - forgot to mention - when I can afford it I might crossfire the 5870 with another 5870, that's why i went for it rather than 2 cheaper ones

^2 - SSD is tempting me....might have to wait a bit tho

Bleh after reading this not sure what to do lol

The X6 1090 seems better for some things but not others, I'm not sure I'd even notice a massive difference in framerate in tf2 etc tho.

Since I'm not gonna overclock it could be the better choice - Also seen some other data which puts the 1090t a bit ahead: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html and http://www.filefront.com/16333651/gamebench.ods/

haven't read through anything here. just a few pointers:

Get on of Intels new i7 K-series*

Get an SSD*. I am running a 128gig Indinlinx (i know there are probably better choices around atm) for about half a year as my boot drive with win7 and absolutely love it. Insta-load of photoshop or lightroom is just cool.

*:if you can afford it and are a bit of an enthusiast.