My final build is in

[nutter]

After months & months & months.......months.....months...... ive finally decided to take plunge.

I could not justify 1k on a gaming rig right now, and with the 5850 & 5870 being out of stock till maybe after christmas, it was a no go anyway, which made me feel better, as had my mind set on a 5850 for months now, but even if in stock, the £50 bump in price, im not being a fool and paying it.

So with lowered budget & maybe abit of common sense, ive gone for this, at just over £600.

AM3 Phenom X4 955 3.2 GHz
Standard cooler
3Gb DDR3 Corsair 1333
500GB Sata
MSI 770-C45
ATI HD 5770
Windows 7 64bit
500W PSU cooler master
CIT 1001 Midi-ATX Gaming Case

Seems best i can do for my budget, shame about motherboard, i read only allows one GPU, but i can always replace the 5770 with a 5850 in a couple of months, and the PSU shoud be more than enough as tests online say uses well below 500Watt for the above set up.

I won't be overclocking just yet either, so standard cooler should be ok.

3gb ram should be enough for now, it will only be used for gaming/streaming. I have a laptop to do other stuff on. 5770 seems to do well enough in games at moment, so do me for next 2-3 months before upgrading.

Just needed a final thumbs up from experts on here

Be gaming on this monitor LG W2254TQ 22"

 

[RJC]

3GB of RAM was this from a triple channel set, as ideally you need dual channel.

With triple channel installed you would only be running single channel.

 

[SMAndy]

Agreed. Get a 4GB Dual Channel set if you can push the extra cost. It won't be too much more though, which is good.

I'd guess you're not buying from here, as there are no AM3 MSI boards. Have you looked at the Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P or something like that? Good board.

Also, you should be able to overclock that chip to about 3.5GHz without increasing the voltage, which means the stock cooler would still be ok for that. The 955 is a black edition, so you can just increase the multiplier.

 

[nutter]

I went for 4gb corsair ram in the end, thanks. Just had enough, certainly not enough to change motherboard. Thanks for help guys. Plus with that motherboard, has a simple overclock switch it says to get 20% extra performance. Which suit me.