[Samjula]

I've been thinking about building a new machine for a while, my current pc has just had some major issues so now seems like a decent time. It will be used primarily for gaming, cod4, race driver grid, mass effect etc, and fallout 3, farcry 2 when they come out, would like it to last at least a year playing new games at high settings. I will be overclocking but am a complete novice at the moment so id have to do some research and reading up on things, that'd be a future project but id like the scope to do so.

My budget is £600 and i will be using ebuyer for the majority of parts, seems like the cheapest for UK customers. I already have a case (antec nine hundread), Monitor (samsung syncmaster 22"), speakers (logitech z-2300), dvd drive, keyboard and mouse. I have an idea of what i might buy but would like to see what others suggest. So, for £600 i need.

Cpu - not quad - e8400?
Gfx - ati hd4870? - 1gb version worth it for an extra £20?
motherboard - not a clue, preferably SLI for the future, best chipset for gaming?
ram - ddr3 worth it? dont think i can quite afford it yet, also couldn't find many ddr3 mobo's
power supply - not sure what kind of power i need yet
hard drive - 640Gb Sata II HDD - think thats the cheapest 640gb

As i said id like to see what people suggest, the things ive suggested are just thoughts and im totally up for scrapping them. Basically what is the best system i can get for my budget that will see the best performance in games possible. CHEERS

EDIT - I will probs be using XP professional 32bit, am i right in saying that 32bit XP limits my ram to 2/3gb? Is 2gb still enough?

Edited by Samjula, 04 October 2008 - 10:32 AM.