Well after some careful re-consideration of my original choice of components, thanks to the Overclock3D reviews and forums, I managed to bring my PC under budget! Meaning I don’t have to wait until next months wages for the sakes of needing an extra £200.

I had originally planned to get an Asus Striker II Extreme 790i motherboard and an XFX Nvidia GTX 280 graphics card.

However, after joining and talking to people on the Overclock3D forums, I learned that if I am not going to utilize SLI… It would be a better choice for me to get an Intel based P45 or X48 board (X48 being the enthusiasts chipset of choice).

So I started digging around for a nice board, taking into consideration the options offered by both the P45 and X48 chipsets. I eventually found the P5E3 Premium Wifi-AP board, according to Overclock3D and other sources this board is an excellent choice. Sporting great overclocking facilities and a 3-phase power delivery to DDR3 slots, and at £50 cheaper than my originally chosen Nvidia based board, I went with this.

Then for the graphics card… Nvidia’s flasgship GTX 280 card is by all means the fastest and most powerful card out there at the moment… But taking all things into consideration, I thought it would be silly to spend an extra £100+ on this card when there are cheaper options from ATI that benchmark around (and on occasion, above!) the GTX 260 and 280. The card I chose was the PowerColor HD 4870 from ATI. Take a look at some of those benchmarks! With that kind of performance, it was hard NOT to justify spending £100 less than what I had planned!

As for the processor, I have gone for the tried and tested Intel Q6600 G0 Stepping 2.4Ghz, with an Arctic Freezer 7 Pro CPU fan. That should hopefully allow me to overclock the Q6600 to 3.5Ghz straight away, just on air!

I have also gone for an eBuyer Hi-Power 1000W Modular PSU, a value PSU that has received great reviews by customers. Since it’s modular, any cables you are not using can just disconnect from the PSU and be stored for later use, so as to not clutter your case with unused wires… They are also braided for nice cable management. It looks the business too! With a 13.5cm fan with blue LED lighting it’s going to look fantastic in my case.

I also got an OCZ 4GB Kit (2×2GB) DDR3 1600Mhz Gold Edition Ram from eBuyer… Unfortunately I can’t link to them as they now don’t seem to exist on the site, and they only offer the lower 1333Mhz ones now! Lucky me!

Overall it totalled at £734.16 delivered (Next day delivery!), all parts purchased from eBuyer. Very good value for money for such a good system in my honest opinion! Especially as I was almost convinced into buying a 2.5Ghz Dual Core, 2GB Ram, Nvidia 8600GTM specced Macbook Pro laptop for £1500!!

Can’t wait to get this thing up and running, unfortunately since I ordered it in the earlier hours of this morning, next day is classed as Tuesday. But I am away until Monday anyway.

I will post pictures of my building process (If I remember!).