[warriorscot]

If you are in the UK the best monitor I have seen lately is the 26" samsungs from the HD series the rose red ones with TV tuner, the are £411 reccomended retail but they are so popular getting that price online is hard but if you have a Costco membership they have them in my local one I even helped the guy set up the display model after I pointed out a mistake in the product spec they listed, it is really good huge resolution great contrast and a TV tuner to boot. Samsung monitors are usually the best value for money and have amazing contrast ratios making the colour reproduction very good.

If you are buying parts in the uk overclockers.co.uk is great and has the best stock also Scan and Ebuyer are good but they don't always have things you want right away as they don't keep as much hands on stock.

I've got a Q6600 and its a great CPU, I've yet to push it to its limits and trust me I have been trying. On the graphics card you want to go with something new, for things like colour reproduction and image quality ATI have always been the best. But the new Nvidia cards have CUDA support which basically lets them run as there own self contained mini-computer and run programs not just visuals. Its not that well used outside of the academic area and for game physics but it does have some potential for different fields and Nvidia cards are very cheap at the moment especially the still excellent 8800GT.

If you look in my profile at my system its something pretty similar to what I would recommend to you for the basic system, I built it as a gaming rig but in general its just a powerhouse PC on a sensible budget. You could put it together not for somewhere around £700 leaving you £800 for monitors and extra peripherals or using slightly better components.

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if you have a Costco membership they have them in my local one

Costco is in Europe? I thought they only held a business in North America. Heh, learn something every day.

Personally as far as monitors go, I recommend the Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP 24", in terms of quality and value, I find that Samsung, LG and Dell are all about even, considering Samsung is the OEM for Dell monitors. If you need an aid to figure out what monitor is best for your needs, you can always google reviews, or you can go to a very handy site called face to face, which can be found here. The monitor I have recommended has a bit of ghosting in games (though I don't think this'll apply to you), but excels in just about every other department. Something else that I highly recommend you invest in, would be some calibration software to assure that you have your colors spot on.

Here is what I'd recommend to you for a build.
Case - Antec900 - 67
CPU -Q6600 - 139
Monitor - Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP - 411
Motherboard - GA-P35-DS3L - 61
Hard drives - WD 640GB hard drive (two) - 106
Optical drive - Pioneer DVR-216BK - 20
Memory - Corsair 4GB - 68
Graphics card Asus ATI Radeon EAH3650 - 51
Power Supply - Corsair TX650W - 73
Operating System - Vista Home Premium OEM 64bit - 75
Total - 1071 inc val

Not sure if you want to spend more money, but I think you'd be really happy with this build. The only cost that I have no included in this build is shipping as I don't know your location, so I wouldn't be of much aid here
James

Edited by james_8970, 10 September 2008 - 09:36 PM.

[james_8970]

if you have a Costco membership they have them in my local one

Costco is in Europe? I thought they only held a business in North America. Heh, learn something every day.

Personally as far as monitors go, I recommend the Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP 24", in terms of quality and value, I find that Samsung, LG and Dell are all about even, considering Samsung is the OEM for Dell monitors. If you need an aid to figure out what monitor is best for your needs, you can always google reviews, or you can go to a very handy site called face to face, which can be found here. The monitor I have recommended has a bit of ghosting in games (though I don't think this'll apply to you), but excels in just about every other department. Something else that I highly recommend you invest in, would be some calibration software to assure that you have your colors spot on.

Here is what I'd recommend to you for a build.
Case - Antec900 - 67
CPU -Q6600 - 139
Monitor - Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP - 411
Motherboard - GA-P35-DS3L - 61
Hard drives - WD 640GB hard drive (two) - 106
Optical drive - Pioneer DVR-216BK - 20
Memory - Corsair 4GB - 68
Graphics card Asus ATI Radeon EAH3650 - 51
Power Supply - Corsair TX650W - 73
Operating System - Vista Home Premium OEM 64bit - 75
Total - 1071 inc val

Not sure if you want to spend more money, but I think you'd be really happy with this build. The only cost that I have no included in this build is shipping as I don't know your location, so I wouldn't be of much aid here
James

Edited by james_8970, 10 September 2008 - 09:36 PM.

[warriorscot]

Shipping is around £8.50 from OCUK at least thats what it was when I got my Zalman headphones and G5 from them last month.

The only changes I would make to James pick is maybe switching to a cheaper 630W Hiper PSU they are cheaper here than they are elsewhere and from experience they are solid and hit way above the price point. I would also switch the hard drives to 7200.11 barracudas mostly because of the cheaper price and longer 5 year warranty as you can't get the better quality black versions of the western digitals just the blue ones and western digital is quite expensive here you get a better disk for your money with the seagate drives. And go with the GeiL black dragon memory http://www.overclock...GB24GB8500C5DC) as it is not much more and is a big bit better. Faster DDR2 is cheap here in the UK as they try to push it into use and there is more competition in that sector of the market.

Other than that I would leave it the same, you could maybe think about one of the energy saving Asus P45 if you want they are pretty good and the splashtop linux is a nice feature if you use an ethernet connection for your PC you can get on the internet in about 5 seconds after hitting the power button.

There is quite a few Costco stores at least in the UK, not sure about the rest of Europe, but there is three in Scotland and 15 down south per head of population there is probably more Costcos in the UK than in the US.

Edited by warriorscot, 11 September 2008 - 02:42 AM.

[james_8970]

I'm going to agree with everything stated by warriorscot, except the memory. The reason why I don't recommend the memory is because of the excessive voltage requirements and because the addition expense will not garner any real life benefits. I recently saw an advertisement by WD that stated that their drives had a 5 year warranty, but upon reviewing that ad, the 5 year warranty is only offered with their new black cavalier line.

There is quite a few Costco stores at least in the UK, not sure about the rest of Europe, but there is three in Scotland and 15 down south per head of population there is probably more Costcos in the UK than in the US.

Cool, it's a good store, I just find that they are funny to deal with that membership as they could probably do much better without it.
James

Edited by james_8970, 11 September 2008 - 01:36 PM.

[warriorscot]

Yeah its only the black versions with the larger 32Mb cache that have the 5 year warranty.

On the memory I think its worth it as the voltages I dont think are excessive but then again I'm used to overclocking on high end boards and the voltages aren't anything special. Higher speeds need more power thus more voltage, just that simple even faster memory types need more voltage and DDR2 actually uses less voltage than DDR used to use even at its fastest speeds.

The membership in Costco lets them run it with lower profit margins, because the memberships basically pay to run the stores they don't feel the strain to have such high markups on goods which means you get great deals like the monitor I mentioned.

[james_8970]

On the memory I think its worth it as the voltages I dont think are excessive but then again I'm used to overclocking on high end boards and the voltages aren't anything special. Higher speeds need more power thus more voltage, just that simple even faster memory types need more voltage and DDR2 actually uses less voltage than DDR used to use even at its fastest speeds.

High voltages aren't anything new to me either, which is why I have a waterblock for my RAM, but that's besides the point. I prefer to suggest 1.8V memory (usually Mushkin as there are one of the few with PC2-6400 1.8V RAM with low timings) as it's more user friendly (no BIOS settings need to be changed), but seeing as that e-tailer doesn't have Mushkin products, that's not really an option. On another note, the increased frequency is essentially a wasted expense as there will be virtually no difference performance wise between the two.

The membership in Costco lets them run it with lower profit margins, because the memberships basically pay to run the stores they don't feel the strain to have such high markups on goods which means you get great deals like the monitor I mentioned.

Yeah, I understand that, just find it a pain as it's just more plastic to carry around in your wallet.
James

Edited by james_8970, 14 September 2008 - 10:18 AM.

[warriorscot]

The performance depends on what you are doing, I have to say I notice the difference especially in high performance applications from the faster speed, but Ive got really good memory that has low timings and the speed and the cost difference isn't much and the timings are better on the faster memory when you run them at lower speeds than getting memory that is already at a lower speed. It also makes overclocking ALLOT easier to have memory with better legs for running at higher frequencies you don't have to fiddle the multiplier so much. Its quite hard to find even memory at PC2-6400 that only uses 1.8V most of the good low latency stuff runs close to 2V anyway and like I said DDR used to run at higher voltages so its hardly an issue in board power management.

I found most of my plastic was useless anyway, I got sick of it one day and dumped every last bit of plastic into a drawer and now I only carry my work access card, debit card, uni id, and drivers license all the rest of the stuff I hardly ever used so I don't carry it unless I actually need it in fact I could even ditch the drivers license as I haven't had to show ID since I was 16 to buy a drink.