Before I buy all this stuff, could you give me some advice?!

[Richard]

Hey guys
I recently bought an XFX 9600GTXXX graphics card for my old system, but then figured I had enough saved up to do a complete rebuild, and get another card the same to run in SLI. It will be mostly used to run games.
Could you just have a quick look at all this and see if it all checks out? I intend to overclock the processor to about 3Ghz.
Thanks in advance for your time.
Power Supply

Xilence 700w Gaming Edition PSU (Code 26715) £58.70

Motherboard:

Asus Striker II Formula nForce 780i (Socket 775) Motherboard (Code 32098) £174.10

Processor:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz 95W G0 Stepping (Retail 775) (CODE 28356) £113.21

Ram:

Patriot 4GB PC2-8500 C5 Viper Extreme Performance (2x2GB) (Code 32494) £76.32

Cooler

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 PRO (Code 20729) £14.04

Hard drive

500GB Western Digital Caviar - 16MB - IDE – 7200 (Code 29972) £56.34

Graphics Card (SLI)

XFX GeForce 9600GT 'XXX AlphaDog Edition' 512MB PCI-E (Code 32424) £93.94

Operating System

VISTA 64 (Code 25906) £61.04

Monitor

20" Iiyama Prolite E2003WS Widescreen LCD Monitor (Code 31129) £146.82

[Lynx]

I would save about £100 and go for a neo2 Fr board. I would removed that 9600, sell the old one and get a HD 4870, which will rip a sli 9600 to shreds to be honest. Other than that its nice, What case?

[Richard]

It's an Alpine EZcool from my last build - pretty solid case with loads of ventilation.
Thanks for the advice!

[nft99]

mostly gaming then swap the q6600 for an E8500 about same price but the e8500 should overclock to 4ghz with ease

[Lynx]

Sli is quite iffy so a single card is very much better. The 9600 is way overpriced for a little more the 4850 is much faster, and the 4870 is even faster.

[Aaron]

mostly gaming then swap the q6600 for an E8500 about same price but the e8500 should overclock to 4ghz with ease
So will the 8400, which is cheaper ;)

[wonderlust]

If you decide to stick with the Q6600 get it on a super special and save a tenner.

I agree, get a cheaper board, with the exception of SLI (which in your case as advised above you would be better off with a newer single card for not much price difference) there is no real advantage between the board you have chosen and the MSI it was suggested you get above. In some cases the P35 may, if you're looking to overclock, overclock better than the Nvidia based board.

[marsey99]

if you want to sli i would get the msi 750i platinum, it has the features of the 780 boards but not the same issues and it cost's alot less too.

96gt sli is about as good as sli gets for efficentcy but you will only get about the same performance as a 98gtx+ which is what i would get for sli.

the rest looks fine expect the hard drive, the samsung F1's are faster than any drive around the same size and i would go with 1 of them too.

[Lynx]

I wouldnt advise against sli at all honestly, if a game doesnt support it you are at a loss on performance, while with a single powerful card there is no risk.

[Monkey]

I would change the Hard drive for a samsung spinpoint aswell
500GB Samsung Spinpoint F1 502IJ SATA2 7200RPM 16MB cache (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Serial+ATA/500GB+Samsung+Spinpoint+F1+502IJ+SATA2+7200RPM+16M B+cache?productId=33024)
Frankly im suprised no-one else suggested that.
Oh wait someone has. DOH!