Very similar spec to my current build SamL. Don't forget to add Vista64 and an optical drive (Blu-Ray is a nice option?). Worth doing the build yourself if possible as it was / is remarkably straightforward and give you lots of confidence ongoing for things such as upgrades. I would agree with the posts above though in that you should go for the 6Gb in 3 runs and there's no need to go for 2 drives ... the 1Tb Spinpoint is excellent. I went for the UD5 MoBo ... not sure of the differences but I believe both are excellent. In terms of cases I went for the 1200 and it's brilliant - made the build nice and easy. As the spec is so similar to mine I'm happy to send you some photos of the insides of my build if it will help on putting it together - just PM if you need them as I found it quirte useful to have a "here's one we made earlier" photo for reference. MoBo and PSU manuals are much better than the were in the past so I'm sure you'd have no problems. In terms of the bits I really like in your build ... PSU is great and a really decent selection of quality cables in the box, Akasa is a nice option and once again simple and straightforward to get right. Good luck and you'll get loads of help here .... I did !
the daniel_k was so last year, my Creative X-FI FPS works fine (only game i had an issue was BF2 game Switching the Sound input to mic one when i was using the brake out box in the CD drive) EAX agane Creative ALchemy resolves that problem that Microsoft made (and that was 2 years ago) if daniel_k had not made new drivers i would of never got an sound card from creative agane i had 2-3 from them lately any way when building the PC make sure you do not destroy/bend (same thing) the Pins on the motherboard CPU socket as thats mostly the only thing that you can do incorrectly (place the cpu down evenly) depending on how much you got to spend SSD can be good to improve the system speed a lot but does add 171 to 250 (corsair S128 or samsung second gen 128gb) to the system for an 128GB SSD
daniel_k's driver controversy focused on his work on making Audigy and Sound Blaster cards work in Vista, not X-Fi. Again, EAX emulation on the Xonar series is good enough that it's not going to be an issue, and to me it seems like EAX matters less and less to people who buy games. Even so, the difference between EAX 2.0 and EAX 5.0 isn't that big. You're very fortunate to have avoided Creative's driver problems, but it would be unfair (in my opinion, at least) to recommend Creative sound cards if they have known issues, both on the hardware/driver front and the corporate practice front.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound obnoxious. My CPU is overclocked to 4Ghz, I do have enough knowledge to save me that... I am not totally stupid; so please, spare me a bit of credit. Indeed, my system is not being built by myself, rather built by a company, which is precisely why I was in need of help for my friend as neither he, nor I have experience in building systems. I thank you all for your advice, it has really enlightened me as I have hardly any knowledge whatsoever of 'mid range' systems. Thanks for your input 'crowmanuk' I would certainly appreciate those pictures...pm'ing you now Thanks all, Sam. P.S if any more of you have suggestions, please feel free to post.
