Hey Spam, hows this system for you:
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit Edition DVD
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "LGA775 Kentsfield" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail
Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme Heatsink (Socket AM2/LGA775)
Noctua NF-S12 1200RPM 120mm Silent Case Fan - 3 Pin
Abit IP35 Pro (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-5300C3 667MHz Dual Channel Kit X2
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 5000AAKS SATA-II 16MB Cache X2
Samsung SH-183LBEBN 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer Serial ATA Lightscribe ReWriter (Black) - OEM
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music 7.1 Soundcard - OEM
Seasonic M12 Modular 600W Silent ATX2.0 Power Supply
Akasa Eclipse 62 Aluminium Case - No PSU
Total : £1,326.35
You should be able to clock the Quad to 3GHZ+ with decent temps.
The Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme Heatsink is one of the best air coolers around and for the pirce its a steel. Since it dosent come with a fan i have just added the Noctua NF-S12 1200RPM 120mm Silent Case Fan which will do the job just fine.
The Abit IP35 Pro is a fantastic P35 Chipset board, very reliable, solid and great overclocking potienal.
The Crcuail Ballistix is fantastic Memory. It will clock to 1000MHZ+ quiet easily.
The 8800GTX is a great card, you should be very happy with it. As said, SLI is a waste of money since not enough games take advantage of a SLI configuration. The performance you get out of SLI at the moment just dosent justify the price you pay for that second card.
Im not to sure if you need Hard Drives since you havent mentioned any in that spec but if you do Western Digital Drives are very reliable and quiet. Great drives.
The Samsund DVD Drive connects to your motherboard via SATA connection, this means you can cancel the onboard IDE controller which should help with boot up times and you can also get rid of them ugly IDE cables.
In my eyes if your spending as much as you are a Sound Card is a must. It can make quite a big diffrence compared to onboard sound.
The Seasonic M12 Modular 600W is a great PSU, very reliable and quiet.
Finally the Akasa case, build quality is brilliant and cooling is of a very high standard too.
Now i have also included Vista, you may not want to move over to Vista just quite yet but if you have XP at home i would higly recomend Dual booting XP and Vista. Its just a great way to experiance Vista fully but if you come acroos some problems you can still use XP as normal. Put XP on one of the 500GB Drives and then Vista on the other.
Also by having Vista 64bit you can ultilze all 4gigs of memory that i have put in.
Vista is really becoming an amazing O/S, yes theirs a few bugs and that but these are getting sorted out pretty quickly now.
No reason not to get Vista not to be honest.
