Please have a noisy and pull apart...

[Jasp]

So with the run up to X-mas and the disappointing Bulldozer reviews its finally time I replaced my 4 year old laptop with something a little more up to date.

Budget £1500-2000, this PC has to last a good solid 3 years with next to no upgrades as I doubt ill have the money to upgrade it lol, the only upgrade I might be looking at is a second GPU. Reliability is key here, I'd like to leave it on 24/7 if required, plus the volume of the thing, I know the old Haf case is whisper quiet, while my m8s Antec 900 sounds like a jet engine.

CPU: 2600k, Its primarily for gaming but I do a lot of heavy encoding in handbrake, for instance I had to leave my laptop on last night for 5 hours to encode 7 episodes of red dwarf so I feel the hyper-threading is worth it in this case over the 2500k.

SSD: Picked the M4 on cats and others recommendations and for the reliability.

Case: Love the Haf X as my cousins got the previous version, found it very quiet and easy to work with.

Bits I'm not sure on are the GPU, is it really worth the money over say a 6950 that's £215 on scan at the mo or a 560ti 2GB. The motherbored, picked it because its gen 3 and gets very favourable reviews plus like the gold/black, though the hot seller seems to be the Asus P8Z68 Pro. Monitor, haven't picked one as not a clue, used to be the Dell IPS one at £200 but seems to have been phased out for a LED version not sure which though. Speakers, Keyboard & Soundcard.

Feel to comment and rip it to pieces please, some objective views is what I could do with here. I'm trying to justify spending that sort of money and struggling lol. Having been on no holidays this year and my greatest purchase for myself being a £116 touchpad I fancy something nice.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Open a separate saving accounts and put some of your budget into that for upgrades,especially for th graphics card. The 28NM AMD and Nvidia GPUs will probably be out in Q1 2012; the current generation is more of a stop gap due to the 32NM process ditched by TSMC. I personally would not spend £380 on a GTX580.

SB-E is also being released in November.

[Jasp]

Cheers Cat, I defo want something before X-Mas, might wait until Dec as I've got 2 weeks off from work then so would be nice to see how SB-E shapes up.