Hi all,

I want to get a new gaming computer but really have very little idea of what is good value for money at the moment. I want to spend around £1000, I don't mind if I go over a little bit but not too much. I've looked at Alienware and wanted to get some opinions on this Vista rig they are selling:

- AMD® Athlon™ X2 5800+ 3.0GHz Dual Core 2 x 1MB L2 Cache (is it worth going quad core?)

- 512MB GDDR5 ATI® Radeon™ HD 4870 (how does this compare to the marginally more expensive 896MB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260?)

- 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 x 1024MB

- 750GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM

- 20X Dual Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Writer

Would really appreciate any comments on this. Basically, I want a decent computer but I'm not prepared to pay the absolute top bucks. If anyone could explain if there is any merit in getting a blu-ray disc drive (I'm not interested in watching BR movies on my computer at the moment, just in terms of future-proofing the machine as I don't know if this is where games are headed in the next 2-3 years) this would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance