Good £500 Shuttle?

[OrangeAgent]

Hi, I plan to buy the following:

Shuttle SN45G v2 + Athlon XP 2600 (£194 @ gemma)
Seagate 120GB 7200 (£58 @ gemma)
512MB PC2700 DDR RAM (£50 @ crucial)
Asus Radeon 9600XT 128MB (£122 @ tekheads)
Sony 52x24x16x CDRW/DVD (£29 @ tekheads)
Creative I-trigue 3300 speakers (£56 @ overclock)

If anyone can advise me as to whether thats a well balanced system and whether I'd be getting good value for money with it I'd be very grateful. It will be used mainly for watching DVDs, listening to music and playing HL2 (fingers crossed). Cheers.

[Shogun]

Swop the 9600xt for a 9800pro for no more money to see quite a large speed increase.
Also i would shed out a few quid more for pc3200 ram.

[OrangeAgent]

Ok thanks for the advice, is this 9800 pro good value?

Also, would I be able to overclock the 2600 quite easily? Or would I need additional cooling?

[menthel]

As you are getting the v2 41g you could get a mobile 2500+ that will overclock like stink. That 9800 pro seems fine.

[Shogun]

That would be good value, If you are really looking for overclocking you will want to get a Athlon XP-Mobile chip. They run at lower voltages so they run cooler and then when you run them at stock Athlon voltages they clock higher. Lower amounts of heat is always good in a shuttle Also if you want to overclock then i would really go with PC3200 ram as it gives you headroom to increase the fsb without it limiting the overclock.

[OrangeAgent]

The Mobile chip is tempting but it would add about £25 as the shuttle/cpu bundle i plan on getting is a pretty good deal. If i then needed to spend more on RAM id be too much over budget. With the chip and RAM i specified is there any scope for overclocking? Just a lot less than with a mobile chip and better ram?

[Shogun]

The normal 2500+ clocks better than the 2600+ iirc. There is always scope for overclocking, it is just limited in some cases Also you might want to get a DVD-RW for about 10 more quid. Just an option.