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The max price is 500 Pounds or 500 Euros?
Anyways - the most important thing you'll need advice with is the CPU and the MoBo - all the other things are usually simply better if they are more expensive so you don't need any buying guidelines beyond that. OK, RAM could be important if you want to overclock but the only thing you should know about that is that Kingston is only good for budget-priced RAM, not the top-performing one and Geil, the once-king(ston? :-D) of high performance RAM dropped to unimaginable shittyness, go for OCZ or Patriot instead. You might even consider the Polish Goodram (LOL at the name) - I'm not even joking, because they mostly use one design for all models, only frequency and latency locked (because it's cheaper), their RAM has quite epic overclocking capabilities (although you have to confirm that by reading some recent reviews).
Cooler - any will do if you don't want to overclock.
Case - any will do if you don't want to overclock.
Cables - oh, c'mon, you don't need advice here unless you want to have a UV cathode in your case and use UV-active cables (which I did once when I had a plexiglas casing - it looked gay :-D)
PSU - IMHO there's no need to go with epic power levels (like 1000W), it's better to buy one in the reasonable 500-600W range but manufactured by a trust-worthy company
HD - nowadays HDDs are cheap and so close performance-wise that I wouldn't give that much thought. I've been using Western Digital drives for several years now and I changed my computer faster than them breaking. I only recall that Seagate dropped its once very good quality a while ago - outsourcing or something like that, whatever
DVD-R - I always go for NEC and there's a reason for that - NEC uses glass lenses for their lasers while all (or most) other companies use plastic lenses. There might be no difference, there might be one after a while - I don't care, DVD-R drives are cheap anyway so why not go with the best components? :-D
So, now to the serious stuff:
CPU - buy the most expensive one you can afford by Intel OR if you realize that you can't go for the upper 1/3rd of processors you might take a CPU by AMD but I don't think this is the right moment to invest in AMD, especially since they have plans of catching up to Intel soon... This is sound advice if you DON'T plan on overclocking. If you do, you should take the CHEAPEST (slowest) model with the same cache, same manufacturing process (e.g. 45 nm) and simply overclock it to the same speed (or higher) than the more expensive models.
MoBo - any MoBo that fits your processor produced by Asus, I'm a bit of a fanboy here but that's because I had really, REALLY bad experiences with e.g. Abit. I don't know where Gigabyte is currently standing but they were producing decent MoBos in the past. Chipset? You choose - I wouldn't worry too much, both Nvidia's and Intel's chipsets perform well and the only difference you might spot is if you tried running your GPU in SLi/Crossfire mode or if you overclocked everything heavily.
There you go - I hope I helped you a bit even though, as you noticed, I don't give the kind of "Buy XXX model YYY" advice since it's your money after all and different shops might sell different components for different prices. When you find something that looks alright read up some reviews on the internet to confirm/disprove your positive attitude. If they're alright, go with it, if they're bad, choose another model in the same price range - rinse and repeat.
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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell
Last edited by Lim-Dul on 31 Oct 2008, 15:51, edited 2 times in total.
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