What would you spend £1200 on (custom gaming rig)

[nerdgeek]

I have posted elsewhere on the forum how I might be spending £1200 of my hard earned cash on a custom build.

Now I'd like to know how each one of you Hexus brainiacs will spend £1200 on your gaming rig.

The rules are:

The price has to include a Monitor.
Everyone component you add must have a link to the site of purchase.
Show the price of each component.
The price does not have to include, Keyboard, Mouse, Mouse Mat, Speakers, USB widgets or a cup holder but can do if you want!
It has to be a gaming rig.
Include your choice of OS but do not include it in the budget.

I'd like to know what the best for the money is and as you will all have really good views on it I'd like to know. That way I can just copy them when it comes to building my own in March!

Thanks to anyone who'll participate in the impending onslaught of my wallet !

I'll then post back in March to let you all know what one I went for and why.

[staffsMike]

Well i'm not doing all the work for you but i'll do rough prices from scan.co.uk which is where I recommend you get most parts. You will get free delivery if you make it upto 25 posts here on hexus, they have a care forum here on hexus and they are genereally the best company to deal with for customer service etc..

Intel Q6600 - £150 + Thermalright ultmia 90 and Fan - £30
Abit IP-35pro - £100 (but to be honest the dark raider at £60/£70 is a great board)
4GB PC6400 RAM (2x2GB) - £70

Corsair is fine as long as you don't need to go faster than PC6400 (over 3.6ghz with the above quad core)
Something like geil black dragon or OCZ might be better. These can be found on other sites such as ocuk.

ATi HD3870 X2 - £260
Corsair 520W HX - £65
Antec P182 - £85
500GB western Digital AAKS - £60
Samsung DVD-RW - £20

Thats around £850 which is about the right amount to spend on a serious desktop. That will run near silent depending on the CPU fan and how loud the graphics card is. The graphics card is a dual GPU card which is proving a bit of a monster and is very cheap considering the performance. The CPU will overclock to around 3.4Ghz or more depending on how good it is. A lot of performance give it's price and the fact you get 4 cores .

The new quads will be out soon so you might want to check out the Q9450 45nm chip which should prove very good but I imagine you will want some serious RAM to see the sort of speeds it will capable of when overclocked. It also comes with a £70 premium over the Q6600.

This leaves around £350 for the monitor. If you do need the keyboard etc.. I would leave around £50 - £75 for that which puts you into cheap 24" or high end 22" territory for the monitor.

OCUK's value 24" at around £250 is very good from what i've seen. I'm not very up to date on monitors but dell, samsung and LG are what I normally go for.

There is a 22" LG Monitor/TV which is very nice if you have use for it. In built Freeview, scart, and all manor of other inputs if they are useful
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

For the OS Vista 64bit is acually quite good and doesn't seem to have many compatability issues

[directhex]

Komplett.co.uk - Shuttle SG31G2B Barebone, Black, Intel G31, 775, PCI-E, SATA, Gigabit LAN - £201
Komplett.co.uk - Corsair TWIN2X 6400 DDR2, 4096MB CL5, Kit w/two matched CM2X2048-6400 Dimm's - £72
Scan.co.uk - 750GB Samsung HD753LJ Spinpoint F1, SATA II, 7200 rpm, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ - £99
Komplett.co.uk - Samsung 24" LCD Syncmaster 245B, Black, 1920x1200, 5ms, 1000:1, DVI - £295
Scan.co.uk - Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450, S 775, 2.66 GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB Cache, Retail - £219
Scan.co.uk - 512MB BFG Technology 8800GT OC2, PCI-E 2.0 (x16), 1950 MHz, GDDR3, GPU 675 MHz, 2 x Dual Link DVI-I - £181
Scan.co.uk - LG GGC-H20L Lightscribe SATA 16xDVD±R, +RWx8/-RW x6 Also READS Blu-Ray/HD Discs black OEM (Inc Soft) - £136

total: £1203

i suspect this isn't going to be a mainstream choice, though

os doesn't really matter if you don't want it in the price, but i'd probably pick vista home premium 64-bit (i'd hate to see the ram wasted by xp 32, and xp 64 is a chore)

[MSIC]

These chaps have given you good specs, so i can only offer alternatives, not necessarily better. I'd personally get it all from Scan too for service & free delivery.
OS: Windows XP Pro SP2 personally.... but really ought to recommend Vista Premium 64bit for the RAM and DX10.

Monitor: Viewsonic 28" £414. Same 1920 x 1200 resolution but WOW.

Base Unit:
Case: Antec 900 £70 (but beware it is big)
PSU: Corsair VX 550W £56
Motherboard: Abit IP35 DarkRaider £73
CPU: Intel E8400 £130 (a 45nm quad would be good but they also are a month away)
RAM: 2 x 2GB Corsair TwinX PC2-6400 £68
Hard Drive: Western Dig 500GB (AAKS) £64
Optical Drive: Pioneer DVD RW (black) £19.
Graphics card: Nvidia 8800GTS 512MB BFG £199. Will do most (not crysis) games at full res, full effects.

Total: £1,100. Under budget. You can also, if you wanted lower noise, add quieter fans etc (but you didnt mention that in your post). Done.

[directhex]

have to make it clear though, tri-sli with 8800 ultras won't do crysis at 1920x1200 with full effects and some AA/AF