Gaming rig?

As much as I love my 5850, I wouldn't recommend you spend £200 on one now when there's one for £160. 6870 is a better bet. If you can wait the new high end ATI cards (proper replacements for 5850 and 5870) are coming out very soon!
 
This is what I would do if it was my £££

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How long have the 1156 and 1366 sockets got left in operating life? Is 1156 going to die when Sandybridge is live to make way for 1155?
 
How long have the 1156 and 1366 sockets got left in operating life? Is 1156 going to die when Sandybridge is live to make way for 1155?

As long as people want to use them for. SB isn't going to have any effect on the performance of 1156 and 1366, is it? Current stuff isn't all going to suicide out of pure shame. Look how many people are still using Socket 775 stuff and keeping up just fine :).
 
Depends what you mean. It won't get any slower when Sandy Bridge comes out but LGA1156 will essentially be an end-of-life socket come Q1 2011, so there probably won't be many new components for it beyond that. LGA1366 will probably be supported until Q4 2011 but after that it'll have the same fate.
 
Well 775 has been around since about 2004 if I'm not mistaken and plenty of people are still using it. So 1156/1356 will still be keeping up for a long time to come if you still have it. If you dont spend massive amounts on really premium priced high end stuff, you can upgrade sooner :).
 
Well, the cheapest i7 is £80 more than the i5 760. You need to spend about £30 more on RAM for i7, but of course you're getting an extra 2GB for that so it's not really a saving per-se, but as 4GB is more than enough it's money you dont need to spend. You're going for a high-end P55 mobo with features like eSATA, dual LAN, decent RAID, robust power circuitry and cooling, better audio, premium overclocking features etc etc, which you wouldn't get until you're spending £200+ on an X58 board, for example the UD5 for £215. So you could put the saving at about £150 and be happy you're not loosing a single FPS in games for that saving :).

Saving with building yourself as opposed to buying pre-built varies depending on current pricing and special offers. Last time I looked at an overclocked mobo/RAM/CPU bundle it was something lke £50 quid more than the individual parts. It can be much less sometimes. A full system is probably £50-£100 more than individual parts on average.

You'll get all the help you need on here, but read plenty of assembly guides before jumping in. Key points are to ground yourself well, make sure you fit all the mobo standoffs into the case tray at the correct positions (1 for every mobo screw hole - probably 9), and do a proper job with applying the thermal compound for the cooler (very important to get right - check out some youtube vids for this).
 
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