I'd have to agree on the scan thing recently, their RMA department is absolutely horrendous, and has been since just before Christmas '09. All this kit can be found elsewhere, just used it as a guide as the wide choice allows one to play with the exact details quite well.

Win 7 is £70ish

A nice 24" 1080p screen is approximately £200, which could be gained from stepping down one tier of motherboard for example. [UD-7] This depends however if Freddie already has a nice screen

Pre-builts are nice in the way it takes 0 effort once its out of the box and plugged in, but I for one get alot of satisfaction from doing it myself. That aspect boils down to personality and confidence however. Another problem with pre-builts is that there are usually corners cut somwhere, and I wouldn't buy one without knowing each part number used in its construction first.

If you want this pre-built I'll do it for £50

I get all my bits from scan and they work fine

But I do live in the same town and I'm lazy

as far as a monitor goes, yeh a good one does make the difference, but its a standalone unit that can be bought at any time, i personally wouldn't skimp on the core hardware for the sake of a monitor. the ssd and hdd you could cut out for the monitor and just get them at a later date as nothing else relies on them being in place. also, he didnt state he wanted a monitor

Kinetic, you forgot cooling


also, as kinetik said, scan is the best place to spec up a pc quickly as it has a good range of products. fred can scout around for deals himself. he didnt say, choose my pc for me so i can just click and buy it. these are just suggestions after all. im sure he's going to have a scout about himself before he buys, id love to know what he decides on.

I didn't forget it, I ignored it watercooling is not part of a reliable and durable pc as extreme overclocks shorten life expectancies. In a pc which is overpowered for todays games, you gotta ask what the point is, benchwhore I got my I7 to 4Ghz but I don't leave it like that, I don't use it aside from transcoding.

Plus to cut a few £100 from the build in exchange for watercooling would mean skimping on other core parts, which was expressly against the brief in the interests of future expansion.

die

CPU: Well you have money so go for Intel. I7s FTW or if you wat something cheaper AMD has some nice 6 cores CPUs such as the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
GPU: You have money so go for nvidia. One of my friends got an Asus GeForce GTX 480 and he says it's awesome. The only thing that drags it down is the noise and that It has a tendency of getting hot.
PSU: Something that's reliable. Believe me when I say that bad PSUs are dangerous. I'm lucky that my room didn't catch on fire.
RAM: Corsair 4GB DDR3 1600MHz CL7 Dominator GT rev. B I recently read a review on those.
MOBO: something reliable (I love gigabyte and MSI)

LINKS:
CPU: http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalo ... CsQ8wIwAg#
GPU: http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=Asus ... hl=en&aq=f
RAM: http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=Cors ... hl=en&aq=f

sry but that ram is dual not triple for the 1366 socket, also i wouldnt choose nvid over ati at the moment, nvidia are playing catchup and frankly the ati 5 series is a much better and safer choice.

also, stay away from msi, i fucking hate them. the gigi ud-9 or a good ud-3. or straying away from gigi, go classified or asus p6t, but i think the ud-9 shits on all of them for pure potential and future proofing

If you really want 6 cores the intel 970 is £600ish. 6 cores at 3.2GHz if you want a higher core count. Still in socket 1366 too, so a drop in upgrade when the prices become more realistic for home use.

Top end Nvidia still doesnt have as much memory as the high tier 5870's, plus I don't like the way their architechture means that 25% of the cores has access to 25% of the memory. Seems very inflexible to me. Yes you get CUDA and PHYSX but they're gimmicks, MS has implemented DirectCompute in DX11 which I'm hoping will replace these in due time.
Plus the heat and power issues of the new top tier, which ATI have had longer to sort. They're both awesome cards at the end of the day, but I feel ATI has the edge still.

Socket 1366 Motherboard are tri-channel not dual channel. Kinda pointless not to use whats there? this time last year it was £124 for 1600MHz 6Gb corsair kit, in comparison the 2000MHz kit looks like a steal, especially with a lifetime warranty. The dominators have little gain on paper versus the classics, occasionally you get 1T less but it depends on which batch you end up with.

I wouldn't go below a UD5 myself, the UD3 got twitchy with RAM running at 2Ghz. UD7 is half the price of the UD 9.

MSI For The Bin!

Cheers for helping guys appreciate it greatly

only had time to skim the replys atm but i'll be back to have a proper look later on.

thanks again

I hadnt intend on getting an entire setup based upon other people's suggestions but the parts bo n kin came up with do sound tasty to me, would the coolant be that detremental without it though? I'm not one for overclocking so i'm thinking it could be a waste really.

The Monitor i currntly have is decent enough at 1650 / 1080, but its by no means a monster so it's something i could look at upgrading too.