[ss3goben]

Hi everyone.

I recently decided to join the honourable ranks of the PC gamer. Using my family PC just doesn't cut it any more, and with my new job, I have decided to set aside £1200-1500 for a gaming PC. Whilst my enthusiasm for PC's has recently piqued, I must admit I'm something of a novice. And so I turn to you knowledgeable folks for advice. With the help of a friend who knows more than I do, I have come up with this rough build, leaving out what I am not sure of yet.

Processor- Q9450, or Q6600. This really is down to whether or not the 9450 offers a superior threshold for overclocking, as I could save £70 by going for the 66 if it can overclock just as well.

Case- Thermaltake Tai Chi with watercooling- to supplement any overclocks, I love the look of this case and don't want to fuss about too much with installing WC myself.

Graphics- GTX280- wanted this due to the impressive benchmarks I've seen it post, and in all honesty I could well pair it up with a second a couple months down the line.

Motherboard/Ram- a grand unknown. My friend informs me there's all sorts of craziness regarding motherboards and overclocking, which my miniscule brain doesn't yet understand, so any suggestions here would be of great help. Linking in with the ram purchase, it is as yet undecided, because I'm not sure if it's worth it to go DDR3 yet.

HDD- My friend insists two 150GB 10000rpm drives would be a wonderful thing for gaming, so this is what I'm leaning towards at the moment.

PSU- again, a bit hazy, but I've looked at 1000W OCZ silent PSU thingy. Is this overkill? Bearing in mind future SLI plans.

DVD drive- Any old thing, I plan to upgrade this to a Blu ray/HDDVD drive a month or two down the line.

Any input at all would be greatly appreciated. So my kind thanks in advance.

Oh, just to add, I've been told to go for Windows XP due to an unreliability in Vista? Any advice with that would be grand too.

Thanks!

[floppybootstomp]

Hmm, observations.... you're on the right path.

You seem obsessed with overclocking.

As your prime interest is games can you actually tell me what advantages you'll enjoy within gaming by overclocking?

It's actually not a great deal.

However, having said that, if I were you I'd go for the Q6600, buy some quality memory as it's cheap now and overclock it to the same speed as the Q9450.

The graphics card is good.

Watercooling is a little over the top, in my opinion. A good air cooler will cool the Q6600 just fine if you stick to a mild overclock. Look at Noctua; Thermalright and Zalman coolers then read reviews on them.

The PSU isn't overkill, the PSU, imo, is almost the most important component as every single component in your machine depends upon it to deliver current on demand. And the OCZ PSU's are a fair price.

Perhaps look at the Antec gamers cases, the 900 et al.

DDR3 is, at the moment, expensive and not worth the cost for the small advantage gained.

Motherboards - Asus; Gigabyte; DFI; X48 chipset if you can afford it or runner up X38 chipset.

Two 150Gb Raptor drives in a RAID 0 config are indeed a wonderful thing. Are you confident enough to setup a RAID 0 on your machine?

Vista will turn it's nose up at older games; Vista has Direct X 10; Vista will only be around another 18 months at most; XP will be phased out soon. So there's a few things to consider.

If gaming's your priority, hard choice, to be honest. If all you want is new games and a sprinkling of older ones, go for Vista, about £70.00 for an OEM version of Vista Home Premium.

In fact, with the machine you're building, I'd go for Vista but only do so in the knowledge that both Vista and XP now have limited life spans, such is Microsoft's way of doing things.....

So there you go, a few thoughts to chew over.

[Waynos_Face]

Would definetly heed Floppys advice go with the Q6600 i have one, i have the heatsink from a QX9650 on mine and at the mo i am at 2.8Ghz with no voltage increase, got as high as 3.3Ghz before i stopped but heat was becoming an issue, runs cool as well and the big noctua is better than my heatsink.

DDR3 RAM not worth it.

GTX280 good card but £420??? on alot of reviews the ATI 4850 in Xfire is beating it and about £150 less for two.

No need for watercooling just get a good air case, antec, coolermaster, xclio.

With the power supply get a good one but make sure it has the right connections for the graphics cards you want.