OK, so I went out and laid my cash down on this baby:

• Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping) - 2.4GHz, 95W (Reports of overclocks to 4GHz on air - I don't know if I believe that, but it's still a monster overclocker)
• Asus P5K-E
• 2GB Corsair XMS2 PC2-6400
• Zalman CNPS 9700 HSF
• Leadtek Winfast PX8800GT
• 1xSeagate 160GB SATA-II HDD (I'll install Ubuntu to it, freeing up my Raptor for Windows gaming and my old SATA-I WD Caviars as either storage space, or a striped RAID - I'll check out some benchmarks before I decide)

It should all arrive by the middle of next week.

Very Nice Monkey. That'll be great. How much, if you dont mind me asking?

The only things you might have a problem with in furute are the Hard Drive (depending on if your into downloading movies and intalling games and what have you) - It may not be big enough, but you can always add another.

And especially if you play games the RAM is pretty damn good for now but may not be enough in a year or two, but again, you can always add more.

I'm only nit-picking here. Its a very good PC.

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Not at all - it's the government's money anyway

Total for this buy, including GPU is about £550. Including the 22" display I bought back in November, it's closer to £750.

It's OK - I already have 576GB of space:

• 1xWD Raptor 36GB
• 2x250GB WD Caviar
• 1x40GB WD Caviar

I'm shifting the old 40GB Caviar over to an eSATA case - the seek times are so high that it causes noticeable lag in Fedora 8, which is what I run off it. I'll definitely put Ubuntu onto the SATA II drive, and maybe Fedora 8. Depending on the benchmarks, I'll run winXP with games on a RAID 0 of the two Caviar drives, or put it with a minimum install on the Raptor, and use the Caviars for storage.
Well, the devil is in the details, though, so nit-pick away

I was originally going to buy some Dominator PC2-10000 from SCAN (it's only down the road after all), but I didn't feel I could justify the price. The biggest issue for me is just how unattractive Vista is - with its integrated support for Intel's Trusted Platform Module, I could wake up tomorrow and find that my PC isn't quite my PC any more. That makes Linux the only real option I have for a 64-bit OS. This means I can't really take proper advantage of anything over 3GB RAM...

DX10 is all very well, but not worth it given the performance overheads that come with Vista, and its seemingly minimal differences from DX9 at the moment.

That's Vista for you. Fully of nice surprises. Yet, however long you hold it back, as its Windows, it will inevitably force its way into being "The Best O/S you've ever had" (Simply because downgrading to XP takes too much time). Also All new software is written for Vista.. Which is a shame. I absolutely hate Vista and would love the run XP again, but if I did, I wouldn't be able to take advantage of a lot of the newer Software that only Vista offers.


But I guess, you could have the same problem with a Linux Distro. Although atleast with a Linux distro if you don't like it you can change it to an older version without the O/S crying its eyes out because it is going to be replaced with something slightly older than itself.

I've never used any Linux distro on a gaming machine.... How do they run?

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I Beat Anorexia.

If I have helped you, please consider donating a little cash to Cancer Research UK

Well, I'm not going to RAID stripe those disks!

Linux works well on my current rig - It actually gets faster over time because it caches applications in RAM as you use them. I guess XP does the same - it's just not immediately obvious when looking at RAM usage...

I've thought about converting completely to Linux in the past, but WINE really doesn't cut the mustard with games - Battlefield 2 (my favourite game for a long time) has only really become playable through Cedega in the last few months, which is terrible given that it's 2½ years old. It's a similar story with the Orange Box - you lose graphical features because WINE doesn't fully support DX9 yet.

Compiz Fusion, on the other hand, coupled with the nVidia driver is just amazing - from what I've seen, it blows Aero away. Admittedly, not having used Vista, I can only go on what I've seen, though. Furthermore, I'm sure that MS will open up the platform to 3rd party developers eventually, and will be able to rely on a massive user and developer base to ensure rapid development of proper Windows eye candy. Till then, though, I think Linux is leading the way in terms of interface enhancements and desktop functionality. Im sticking with XP because, like you said, it'll be a total bugger to go back once Vista is installed - a couple of my mates have had huge problems getting Vista off their laptops because the manufacturer hasn't released proper XP drivers.