PC Dying - £400 spec needed

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Loughborough
I currently have an Abit Aw9D-MAX with an E6600 C2D which happily tootles along at 3.1ghz. Fitted with 2gb of Geil PC6400, an 8800gts 640mb card, a 620w corsair PSU and about a TB of SATA drives. Finally a rather loose fitting Scythe which I definitely want to replace.

The board has some serious USB issues and generally is unreliable and almost 2 years old. It wouldn't boot for an hour tonight until I disconnected my monitor hub. Half an hour later its back with everything working fine. Basically I lost power over USB about 6 months ago and have to use powered hubs for everything.

I'd like to upgrade to something a bit more current, preferably Quad as I like my Flight Simulator and 4gb RAM, although I will be sticking with XP. I generally play strategy games and apart from the odd FSX sessions I'm not a big 'action' gamer.

Assuming I have around £400, and that I am woefully out of touch with what is good value these days, can anybody help. I am no stranger to overclocking and happy to fool around with clocks and multipliers, but it's 2 years nearly since I built a PC.
 
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Asus P5Q Intel P45 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard Asus P5Q Intel P45 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £77.99
(£91.64) £77.99
(£91.64)
GeIL 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Black Dragon DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GB24GB6400C4DC) GeIL 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Black Dragon DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GB24GB6400C4DC) £51.99
(£61.09) £51.99
(£61.09)
HIS ATI Radeon HD 4850 IceQ 4 Turbo 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail HIS ATI Radeon HD 4850 IceQ 4 Turbo 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail £111.99
(£131.59) £111.99
(£131.59)
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 LGA775 'Wolfdale' 3.00GHz (1333FSB) - Retail Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 LGA775 'Wolfdale' 3.00GHz (1333FSB) - Retail £99.99
(£117.49) £99.99
(£117.49)
Sub Total : £341.96
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £8.95
VAT is being charged at 17.5% VAT : £61.41
Total : £412.32


Screw quad ;].
The only thing missing here is nice cooler but I am not sure if that will fit into your budget. You can actually save some cash by buying another 2gb of the same ram you got as long as its good pc6400. Also you can sell CPU / GPU for some extra cash.

Overall pretty good setup if you slap nice cooler on it and OC to 3.8+, you might get away with cheaper board as well unless you want to push it to the limits.
 
Cheers PhoenixUK.

(1) Is my 620w PSU okay for the Radeon?
(2) How noisy are they; I can hardly hear my GTX even when gaming.
 
Yep your current PSU will be completely fine.
The IceQ version is dead silent ( I've had iceq 16xx, 19xx, 29xx, 38xx series - great stuff) thats why u pay extra 15quid over the basic version.
I would go for it anyday, now just waiting for HIS IceQ 4870s :).

Also if you want to stretch the budget a bit and OC higher you might consider getting the PC8500 version of memory and TRUE or Tuniq defintiely.
 
Finally any ideas what sort of improvement the 4850 offers over the 8800gts in terms of frame rates and IQ?
 
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