Full PC build on a budget < £670

Get a different motherboard. No way are you going to achieve your overclocking goals with something that crappy. Same goes for the PSU.

 

Given a point of view from the other side of the river.

Why not AMD?, that is, talking strictly in terms of price. A Phenom II X2 550 paired up with one of the many super cheap AMD boards its a good deal these days. And why not nudge a little bit the margins and go with a capable DDR3 board? think the benefits justify the extra cost.

Also:

God bless ShaidarHaran for that advice. One tends to underestimate the strong importance the PSU has for the correct throughput of the system.

 

Get a good PSU, not necessarily a high wattage one. Unless you're going totally crazy on the overclocking or are going to stuff loads of 10K rpm disks along with more than two graphics cards, a 550W quality PSU (or even something like a £55 Corsair HX450) will go a long way.

 

You can get a better system for the same money or even less with a AMD setup.

AMD PhenomII AM3 X4 945 3gig £119.99 inc VAT
http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=370831&CatId=0

Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P Socket AM3 £71.99 inc VAT
http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=390230&CatId=0

DDR3 is only about 10% more then DDR2 so I would go with DDR3.

 

Do not buy a socket 775 rig these days. Overpriced and outdated, you can gt better performance and future upgrade options for less money by going the Phenom ii route. They're great overclockers as well, modern Q6600s don't clock like they use to and that thing isn't half a power hungry, hot chip once overclocked.

Step up the GPU as well, a 4830 or 4850 can be had for peanuts and will give you close to a 2x upgrade. In all honesty, considering you want to save as much money as possible I'd recommend waiting till the end of the month when the i5 and new Radeon launches are sorted out.

You want to switch out that PSU/case combo as well, it'll probably blow up with those components, and that's not a joke either, I'm deadly serious. For a low cost case/PSU combo you can't go far wrong with Coolermaster's bundles, the PSUs aren't the best in the world but they're a million times better han any generic unbranded one, I've used one myself and got great results.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135101

 

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 - £122.96

Quad Cores are still pointless as game/application support is still poor at best, nothing beat's a high clocked dual core and this E8400 will clock a lot higher and easier then the Q6600.

Link : http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139971


Motherboard - XFX nForce 750i SLI - £71.02

Very Very good 775 motherboard, over clocks very well and has a nice set of features and SLI support!!

Link : http://www.ebuyer.com/product/151011


Memory - OCZ 4GB DDR2 1150MHz - £59.05

Very fast RAM and should over clock to 1200Mhz+, Pretty cheap to boot!!

Link : http://www.ebuyer.com/product/164793


HDD - Samsung EcoGreen F2 1TB,32MB - Cache OEM - £53.79

1Tb space for a couple of quid less

Link : http://www.ebuyer.com/product/164282

Case - Coolermaster Elite 330 Black Case With CM eXtreme Power 460W PSU - £59.99

Decent case but more importantly a decent PSU!!

Link : http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135101


Monitor - BenQ G2220HD 22" TFT Monitor 1920x1080 - £138.23

Had this monitor myself yesterday!! Picture is awesome, also HDCP compliant with DVI-D

Link - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158568


Graphics card - Asus GTS250 Dark Knight Edition 1GB - £98.20

Alot better then the card you picked!! 1Gb of VRAM will come in handy for 1080p gaming! Also will work loverly with the PSU, Add another later on for SLI action

Link - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169450


That should leave about ~£70 for odds and sods, I recommend a decent heat sink for the E8400 so you can take it to 4Ghz

 

Outdated? They are still 10%+ faster then Phenom 2 on a per clock basis..

 

In order to get the benefit of a Quad Core Phenom 2 the applications you would be using need to be Quad aware/enabled. And in my eyes there just isn't enough support out there in applications and games to warrant a Quad Core. I recently changed my CPU from a Core 2 Duo to another Core 2 Duo.

A 4Ghz+ Core 2 Duo E8400 would beat a Phenom 2 in 99% of applications due to 99% of applications not being Quad enabled, most games/applications use 2 threads at most and in that case clock speed is key

X4 socket will last longer but it's still behind Intels socket 775 processors, with i5 just around the corner the prices of 775 parts are only going to go in one direction, and that is down

 

775 been superseded already by the i7 boards (don't know the socket number) afaik

 

For a little point of reference let me share my recent upgrade for my living room PC which acts as a media server for my PS3/home network and a LAN gaming machine.

A Corsair 550W PSU powers the following:
GTX 285 o/c'd to 702/1584/2754
Q9550 @ 4GHz (8.5x471)
Gigabyte P45-UD3L
4GB DDR2 1000 + OCZ RAM cooler
OCZ Vendetta 2 HSF w/dual 120mm fans including one high RPM Scythe fan @ 1900RPM
6x 120mm case fans
640GB WD Caviar Blue SATA HD
1TB Hitachi 7K1000.B SATA HD
typical DVD-RW

Well worth the price. Busts 20k 3dmark06 and there's not a game on the market I can't play @ 1080P with full in-game details on my 42" plasma. The mobo, CPU, HSF, and 1TB HD were just recently purchased for a grand total of $405 including tax.
The CPU was a mere $170, mobo $100, HSF $30, and HD $80 (tax was $25). Saved another $20 with mail-in-rebates after the fact as well. Normally I don't give a crap about MIRs but my g/f is nice enough to send those in for me so it's a win-win

This was upgraded from an E8400 @ 3.6GHz on a Gigabyte P35 board which is now pulling duty as my main gaming PC in my bedroom. 8800 GT outputting to a 22" 1680x1050 LCD is enough to play any game at that res so it's good enough. Used to have the E8400 @ 4GHz but my o/c's stability degraded over time as the chip needed insane voltage to reach such high clocks because the P35 board's voltage regulation isn't near as good as the P45 board's.

Long story short, upgrading to a cheap 775 quad core has allowed me to hit new performance levels and achieve better stability. Encoding dual MPEG-2 streams to .VOB for DVD burning in less time than a single stream on the old dual core is quite tasty Don't rule out an "old" 775 quad if you can get one for cheap. The i7 isn't that much faster. My roommate has an i7 920 @ 3.33 and my rig is definitely faster. He spent $60 more on his CPU, 3x as much on his mobo and RAM so I believe I got the superior value as well. Granted I did build his system for him 3 months ago but prices on i7 gear haven't come down that much.

Funny/interesting sidenote on the Hitachi drive. I was looking for a TB or larger drive to store my media on and was thinking WD all the way because I've had such good luck with them recently with 3 systems in my house using 640GB Caviar Blues as system drives, but they don't make a Blue version of their 1TB drive, only Green and Black. Since this drive is only used for file serving it wouldn't be horrible to use a Green drive but I'd only want to go that route if it were a huge 2TB drive. Anyway, was getting ready to go down to MicroCenter and pick up a drive when I thought I'd do a bit of research online first. Saw they had the Caviar Black 1TB drives for $105 ($10 more than Newegg so I ruled it out), the Samsung Spinpoint F1s for $88, and this drive for $80. I happened to come across this review and after seeing the results I figured I'd give the Hitachi drive a chance. I definitely didn't expect that much performance for such a low price, and was shocked to see an Hitachi drive at or near the top of the performance charts in nearly every category (excepting access time, no idea what's up there because the drive isn't any slower than my 640GB Blue). So far so good. Great transfer speeds on large files. Copied my entire media library (some 360GB worth) to the Hitachi drive the night I set it up and it was as fast as I expected. Great drives, in case anyone's looking for a new one.

 

This is incredibly overkill. My Mugen 2 keeps my 3.8 GHz q9550 below 60 degrees with a single Slipstream fan at 800 RPM (and it needs quite a bit of voltage because of my sucky mobo ... 1.4 Volt under load, BIOS setting is 1.5125!).

 

What is your load test? I run OCCT Linpack 64-bit and on my quad it hits 76 degrees C. I think your load-testing isn't severe enough.

I'm not saying my cooling choice is right for everyone, as it is certainly audible (unless the AC is on) but it certainly works for me. I've got a Xigmatek HDT-S1283 (almost the same cooler as the OCZ) with dual 120mm fans cooling my E8400 and again using OCCT Linpack 64-bit it hits 67 degrees C, so a 9 degree delta between my dual and my quad core systems but with another 400MHz on the quad as well.

I'd say that's not overkill. No idea what either systems reaches under normal loads as I don't find the every day temp to be terribly relevant, I want to cool for worst-case scenarios (like if I start running SMP + GPU folding again).

I hear ya on that one. The Gigabyte P35-DS3L board I run my E8400 on has the exact same problem with similar voltage drop. I decided to quit stressing my components so much and actually backed off of my 4GHz o/c and the > 1.5V vcore setting in the BIOS required to achieve such a clockspeed. I think at the end there I was setting 1.5325V in the BIOS to pull off 1.44-1.47V in Windows under load and that was just too much for comfort on air cooling, for me at least.

 

I hope you're putting a Terabyte of Gaming Goodness™ on that hitachi drive

 

Core i7 is 16% faster then 775 per clock, all you mate has to do is clock his i7 to 3.7-3.8Ghz and his i7 will beat your Quad, At 4Ghz his i7 will completely hammers yours.

 

Not a huge fan of Linpack, but I tried it just now and it peaks at 73 after 10 minutes (idles at 40). So it's still good enough. Of course this is in a case with bottom mounted PSU (P182) so it has the exhaust fans next to it (also 800 RPM). I wouldn't get any other type of case any more nowadays though, there's plenty of cheap options. No matter how good the PSU, if the fan in it spins up high it will generate more noise than any other fan in my system ... pushing air from the CPU cooler through it makes no sense at all unless it's pulling solo duty as exhaust fan in a very small system.

Maybe it's just that the Mugen 2 is really good Bit of a bitch to align the backplate to get it on but on the other hand you can't overtighten the screws, which is a nice touch (when the thread stops it's done). The cheapest of the high end coolers, definitely recommended.