New rig

[Whaleboy]

If you're going with Allendale (E6300 and E6400), then that mobo is a good choice - P965 OC's better than 975X, even if the 975X outperforms at the same FSB. You should be able to reach some high clocks with good cooling. TBH, I've never heard of that cooler, but the Tuniq Tower 120, Scythe Ninja Plus, and SP-128 are all top-quality coolers.

Indeed, I've heard the P965 boards can reach high FSB's which is a bonus for the Allendales with their low multipliers. The cooler I'm going to use is the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro which seems to be getting good reviews. I was tempted by the Scythe Infinity, but that just seems like uberkill. A friend of mine took his E6300 (with 7x multiplier) close to 3.6Ghz using that same board with the Freezer 7, not that I'll go that high for the same reason you don't.

As for sound card, I'd highly recommend any of the Auzentech cards. The X-Mystique is great, and cheap - think of it as an X-Fi without the proprietary EAX 3 extensions (which only work in some games, anyway). It encodes/decodes even better than the X-Fi according to some reviews, and has quality DACs.

Awesome . I'll certainly look into that, a quick google search shows that the X-Mystique is a fair bit cheaper than the X-Fi as well .

I don't see why it wouldn't be, although you may need to compromise a bit on settings for some games - fear prey and ut07 (frame rates don't matter so much in flight sim)... given that dx10 cards will be out soon, with a range of new games supporting it (starting with flight sim x) you'll probably want one of them pretty quickly anyway.

Hmm, I want to be playing at native resolution using max details at playable frame rates. I know there's a bios from Asus for the motherboard which will support Crossfire, then all I'd need to do is buy another X1950 GT. That means dropping another £150.00 though.

Another option would be this:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=466117

The Geforce 7950GT is essentially a slightly slower 7900GTX. I may get that, plus the Accelero X1 cooler, attach the cooler and overclock the nuts of this card. XFX managed to get it running at 610/1600 core/mem using passive cooling http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...ductID=488120.

Since its a late-gen product, all the chips should be very overclockable; a cheaper card with the Accelero could very well be the solution here .

[Zylka]

Ohhhh Whaleboy. You're much too philosophical to be buying nice things. But here's a nice one anyway:

[Addled Platypus]

dump the ATI

use Gforce

you will thank me later