I currently have an Athlon XP 2400+ with 1Gb ram and some GeForce 3 card I nicked off my housemate. It's upgrade time.
Overclocking - never have, never will. DX10 support - irrelevant - I play the kind of games you can pick up for a fiver or less second hand like Doom 3, UT 2004, Deus Ex II (or at least I will when I get a machine can run them ) Also I mainly use Linux (Kubuntu) so anything I can run under Linux, like UT2004, I do. Quieter is better. Got to have Firewire and USB on the front of the case. Must have Nvidia 'cos ATI's Linux support is generally considered to suck.
Here's what I'm thinking -
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 ('cos it's the new bang/bucks sweet spot) (Scan LN19275)
Asus P5K, iP35 ('cos 1333FSB and Firewire) (Scan LN18699)
520W Corsair HX Series Modular PSU (good reviews and quiet) (Scan LN15216)
2Gb (2X1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC5400 (Scan LN12200)
320Gb Samsung Spinpoint SATA300 16MB cache (Scan LN17225)
Gigabyte Triton 180 Black (Curiously Scan only have the model this replaced, can get it locally for under £50)
NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT 256MB DDR3 HDCP Extreme (manf part no PV-T71J-UHE4 - can get for £132 delivered - 'cos it's decently powerful, totally silent and has good reviews)
I'll take the DVD burner out my current machine.
Thoughts, suggestions?
cheers,
mike
p.s. This is only my second post so I can't post urls yet, in case you were wondering why I haven't)