Advice for a complete noob please!

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Having decided to invest in a new office desktop for simple office tasks, I thought I should dabble in some PC gaming also.

Main targets are for some iRacing action together with some Battlefield 3 if at all possible.

Working on a very strict budget I managed to pick up the following for less than the price of a half decent graphics card:-

-Gigabyte GA-G31M-25L motherboard
-Intel Pentium Dual core E2220 (2.4GHz dual core)
-250GB Maxtor 7200RPM SATA II hard disk
-NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600 GT Graphics card 512MB
-Thermaltake 500W TR2-500 ultra quiet power supply
-2 GB GEIL PC2-6400 DDR2 800MHz RAM (1GB X 2) [expandable to 4GB]

In addition I sourced a Intel Q6600 CPU for a further £50.

Question is, if I had £150 or so to spend, where would I now be best focusing for improving possible gaming action - the PC will feed a 24" Dell 2405 monitor. I know in the future a complete rebuild will be best - but I want to test the water before parting with that serious amount of cash!

Cheers in advance
 
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Yea it does only have 2 slots so been looking at a Kingston Hyper X kit.

Will focus on the GPU first then Ram so have got some time to search out the best deal - thanks :-)
 
Gonna pull the trigger on either that 6870 card linked or maybe the MSI 6870 Hawk? - will order on Friday so thats the GPU sorted.

Looking at Ram and boy - DDR seems expensive - might look at the Crucial Sport deal on til 6pm today? Any other suggestions Ram wise please?
 
I've seen it for £5 more than the XFX (with only one game though) - been mulling over the 2 tbh due to the probable better cooling of the MSI?

Maybe its a simpler decision than I'm making it ;)
 
I personally own http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-190-CS&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=813 and they're quite nice. Same price as the Crucial ram for this week only.

Thanks for the link - looking at Corsair, Crucial and Kingston all around the same price.

DDR2 certainly a tad more expensive than DDR3 right now.

Need to get the Ram sorted in the next week or so, 'cause I have my eyes on a new case, keyboard and mouse after that - haven't even got the actual machine yet (due tomorrow) and I've already spent any spare cash for the next month :D
 
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