I am looking at building a new desktop machine and as it is some years since I did this, I am a little out of the loop. The plan is to be a mixture of gaming machine – FPS mostly – and photo editing, with some light video editing, although this will grow as time moves on. The budget is £1k max, and if this could include the monitor that would be great, but I do have a serviceable Phillips flatscreen so that is not as important and can wait a while if necessary.

I have a couple of questions that are probably slightly noob-ish but if you don't ask you don't learn.

1) How much of a difference would moving to the X58 chipset make against the Z68, all else being equal, is it worth the extra?
2) Assuming the answer to Q1 being no, would a Core i7 make that much of a difference against an i5. Am I better getting a faster i5 or a slower i7?
3) Graphics card, I am looking at the GTX 570 – specifically this, any reason why not?
4) Finally has anyone experience of the Scan 3XS Overclocked bundles? They look OK and would take some of the guesswork out of this but how reliable are they and indeed Scan in general?

Thanks in advance for any assistance, tips, hints or guidance.

Cheers,
AndytheBatch

For you I would suggest going down the i5 2500k route for the processor - the i7 2600 is slightly quicker but not worth the extra £70-80 more.

The X58 chipset will soon be obsolete which is why I suggested i5 route using socket 1155.

With regards to Scan I've just had a run-in with them on behalf of the company I work for as they sent us 2nd hand goods - been a right pain to deal with. The word "slippery" would sum up my feelings on them and our company won't be buying off them again - purchased several £1000s off them in last 6 months alone.

John,
Thanks for the heads up both on the socket format and the supplier.
Have decided to go with the following
Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) Motherboard
2nd Generation Intel® Core? i5 2500K 3.30GHz Socket LGA1155
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 TI ***Limited Edition***
Corsair Vengeance Blue 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800 C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
MSI GeForce GTX 570 Twin Frozr III Power Edition/OC 1280MB GDDR5
Coolermaster CM 690 II Advanced Nvidia edition - Black - No PSU
Corsair TX 650W V2 ATX2.31 80 PLUS® Bronze Power Supply
OCZ Agility 3 SATA III 2.5" 60GB Solid State Hard Drive
Samsung SH-B123L/BSBP 12x Blu-Ray Combo Drive
All from Novatech for £919.86 and I collect on Saturday.

Typically, because I didn’t hit the magic £1k figure and despite all my best protestations to the contrary before I started this I now want the new monitor... now!!!!

So, I looked for both the ViewSonic VP2365wb and the Dell U2311H but they seem to have an existence similar to Brigadoon. If anyone has a recommendation for a 23” or 24” widescreen monitor good for gaming and some photo / video editing, suggestions very welcome. Very hard and painfully won threshold of £250. Anymore and my good lady has offered to demonstrate “that technique I learnt in Tunisia”; the way she says it, I know it’s not something I would enjoy!

TBH as for the SSD I'd check the Crucial M4s since they've released new firmware that drastically improves their performance, now pretty much on a par with the Vertex Series.

You may want a quick look at this comparison between the Vertex and M4 on bit-tech clicky

	Quote: Needless to say, the improvement to the Crucial M4 256GB’s performance is more than palpable; the 4KB sequential read speed as measured in ATTO has jumped by more than 70 per cent in comparison to when we first looked at the drive. The headline number is the jump of the sequential read speed to over 500MB/sec read, though; a fact that is sure to worry SandForce and its ever increasing stable of drive partners. In comparison, the Vertex 3’s latest firmware is more of a performance rebalancing, with minor tweaks here and there, although its multi-threaded 4KB random read did rise over 10 percent. However, the numbers only tell part of the story. The Vertex 3’s headline speeds only occur with compressible workloads such as those used in the ATTO benchmark, whereas the M4 treats compressed and incompressible files the same. We’ve found that most commonly used files, such as video, audio and most game files, are already compressed, so real world performance was closer to the Vertex 3’s slower speeds (which are still very quick, as the AS-SSD performance graphs show).

The only problem with testing like that is that they generally just test the larger capacity SSDs and seldom mention whether the performance improvement is standard across capacities.