right,
SWMBO has given the green light on a new desktop and my provsional budget is £1000.
I have W7 Pro all ready to go on it and Monitor, keyboard, mouse. Everything else is required.The old desktop will be sold off to subsidise its replacement.
So I am asking for thoughts on what to buy.
I keep on switching between a pure self build or a customised off the shelf job. Mr Indecision is in da house!!

That indecision is going to make a reasonable difference to budget:

For £1000 though, you are looking at a Core i7 920, 6Gb DDR3, GTX275, decent extras quite easily. Quite possibly a GTX285 will be doable, I haven't checked numbers.

I'd say

i7 920
Fenrir Titan
Asus P6T Delux v2
12GB 1600MHz XMS3

to begin with

Depends what you want to use it for.

Regardless of what you are going to use it for, i7 920 should be top of the list.

The i9 is coming soon with 6 cores instead of the i7's 4.

Might be worth considering?

Well, it'll be compatible with x58 (1366) but it'll be hellish expensive when it comes out, eating up most of that grand.

Ignore the i5, it's just a gimped i7 with a marginally lower price tag.

Yep the i5 is a waste of space - a socket with no clearly defined upgrade path and almost as dear as the i7 series which has triple channel ram.

Just rebuilding my own rig later this week around the i7 950, Noctua NH-U12P cooler, Asus P6T SE mobo and 6gb of ram.

The i7 920 is cheaper and can overclock well but I was given a great deal on the 950.

For graphics I'd say go for the new Radeon 5870

Heh, thought I'd give the challenge a go.
Kinda my first stab at this, thought it might be a bit of fun.

525W Enermax MODU82+ EMD525AWT Modular Triple PCI-E Rail, ATX12v 2.3 , 88% Eff, AirGuard, SafeGuard £74.38

LN25239 Intel i7 920, D0 SLEBJ S1366, Bloomfield, 2.66 GHz, QPI 4.8GT/s, 8MB Cache, 20x Ratio, 130W, OEM £199.15

LN26454 Asus P6T Deluxe V2 - £198.00

LN26793 12GB (6x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-24 £205.99

LN27518 CM Storm Scout Mid Tower Black Case w/o PSU (Gaming) £74.97

LN28632 Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2 - S1366/S1156/S775/AM3/AM2+/AM2/939 Up to 130 Watts! £18.39

LN29195 1GB ScanFX GTX 285 55nm, 2484MHz GDDR3, GPU 648 MHz, Shader 1476 MHz, 240 Cores. OEM £218.33

Net Total £860.17
Carriage £10.51
VAT £130.60
Total £1,001.28

All from scan.co.uk

How'd I get on for a Mac user then?
EDIT: No Hard drive!
Doh.
Use your old one.

Nice try Professor but what about a monitor?

If I read this bit right -


- it's not needed?

Possibly but he has sent me a PM saying it needs to include a monitor so a little confused

Hmm. Maybe go with 6GB RAM and a GTX 275 then?
Scan were doing 22" display bundles on some of the nVidia cards, I noticed.

Will a 525W PSU be enough for all of that kit?

I'd have thought so. But then I have no idea.