Hi,

I have been out of the PC building loop since 2003, but have been reading lots of info off these forums over the last few days and have come up with the following system:

Motherboard Gigabyte GA 965P-DS3 iP965, £71.66

case (hoping to keep existing one, so girlfriend doesn't find out)

CPU e4300 £105.39

Memory Geil 800 ddr2 2gig £105.74

Cooler Arctic 7 £11.69

Graphics EVGA Super clocked 8800GTS £218.00

PSU coolermaster 600w £62.73

x2 40 Gb HGST (IBM/Hitachi) 0A30491 Deskstar 7K80, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 2MB Cache, 8.8 ms, NCQ £44.62 (total for 2 drives for OS) Raid stripped, i have other drives for storage.

Total £619.83

What do you think? Is it time to buy or should I wait?

If the case is a ATX case then it should work. Rest of the parts should work well together to build a very nice system.

I'd say if you can stretch the extra little bit go for the e6300 and be safe in the knowledge that it easily overclocks to at least 3.2ghz, and most will go to 3.5ghz on air cooling

(http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=606&p=2)

and when you get the GTS, download riva tuner and use it to set the fan to constantly 100% when gaming - I reduced my on load temps by 15 degrees doing this and it allowed for a further 20mhz overclock (now running at 630/950)

also make sure you have decent extraction on the rest of the PC, I was relying on a 120mm out, 80mm in plus the power supply fan and my in case temps were getting quite high after upgrading to an 8800, so I now have a YS Tech 125cfm 120mm drawing out instead of the super silent 40cfm

lol at the keeping case. My buddy does the same so his mum wouldn't find out. She's too to figure out. lol

andybird123, thanks for the link. Very no-frill. This is for DS3:

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/har [...] 01220.html

Of all the selected parts, I have doubts about the CM PSU. Pick something from the tier-2:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] p?t=108088

Thanks for the replies so far.

andybird123 : I will pay particular attention to the case cooling as it's something I have not given too much thought to in the past.

akhilles : Have you got a suitable PSU in mind that is not too disimilar in price?

Actually the E6300 is far more difficult to get to those speeds than the E4300.

The chips are built using the same process, same parts, etc.. had have the same exact potential in regards to the chance to reach any potential speeds.

The difficulty of the E6300 is that it needs far higher FSB speeds to get achieve high speeds.

A FSB of 400 will achieve a result of 3.6Ghz on the E4300 but only 2.8Ghz on the E6300. A verymoderate FSB of 333 will yield results of 3.0Ghz on the E4300. The FSB will need to be raised to close to 450 for the E6300 to reach these speeds.

At these speeds you will need serious chipset cooling if you are even lucky enough to get it to work. If you read the review of the 965 chipsets on Toms, you will see many failed far far sooner. Now there may be newer bios updates and other items that help, but no promises.

(Note: You link was truncated)

I don't want to limit your choice. Pick one from this list:

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/har [...] 65#1491365