Upgrade Advice

[Sukh]

Decided to use my old components in my brothers PC and buy myself some nice shiny ones:

Going from:
Gigabyte p65 DS4
e6300 Allendale
x1800xt
OCZ 450W modstream

To Hopefully:
Abit IP-35 Dark Raider
E8200
8800GT
Corsair HX 520 Modular

Is the modular worth the extra money, I quite like it looking tidy since I have a window, and think it helps with temperatures.
Will those components go together, and is there anything that bests it bang for buck?
Is it worth switching to Vista (Is it worth switching to Vista, considering I game, and like XP) and getting 2GB extra ram?

 

[V3g3tto]

Dunno what that dark raider stuff is , but the board is ok.

Personally i would go for the Asus P5K or the MSI Neo FR for the same price (both look cool in side window too).

I swear by modular cabling, most people here just look at performance, until they realise half of the amazon is in their case. It's great, i have just a handful of meshed cables connected, instead of like a dozen. Worth the extra money for me.

CPU is fine, next one up would be to get the Quad Q6600, extra £30, else you're fine if you wanna stick to that lower price.

Dunno what RAM you got now, but make sure it's compatible. At least 2gb really, this site does a good offer on OCZ platinum PC6400. It's DDR2 800, best bang for buck really.

Vista is lovely, but from a performance angle, it takes some juice. Compared to XP it runs slightly slower and uses more RAM, but for me it's worth it because it's so clean and nice to use.