£3,135.39 is the final figure, which includes both XP and Vista 64-bit, fans, and my heatsink - I'm buying the OEM version of the processor, which is £55 cheaper than retail, and also a heatsink/fan, which costs me £35 and is a million times better than the crap packaged with the retail version of the processor. This is it, the Tuniq Tower 120:

http://www.thg.ru/cpu/20050813/images/tuniq_tower.jpg

Stands at 15.5cm tall, the heatsink/fan is 5cm above the motherboard, allwoing for components (like the RAM modules) to fit underneath it, and the 120mm fan in the heatsink can be removed and replaced with my own fan. Apparently it's one of the best heatsinks on the market, so who am I to complain? :p And combined with thermal paste (Arctic Silver 5) and supposedly some of the best fans on the market (Panaflo 120mm fans, which shift 115CFM at about 40dBa and a few thousand RPM).

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As for getting it cheaper, GLG - not in England I won't. I've looked around a number of sites, and I can't find the parts any cheaper. It costs the equivalent of $6,225.94... but if I bought it all in America, it would only cost $3000. Farken taxes.

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Dell's... for large companies who need computers, Dell is superb - the machines are reliable, and in bulk come very cheaply. For personal purposes, however, I'd be better using an abacus and a pad of paper.

Which neatly brings me on to laptops... I'm not a laptop fan. Not a fan at all. A gaming laptop of lower specs would cost me twice as much, be impossible to upgrade, and overheat every ten minutes. For word processing and general dicking about in Paint, a laptop is fine, but for anything else (particularly what I have in mind), well, I might as well crack out the abacus again.

This is looking like it'll be brought forward a month - my current PC has decided it's had enough. Everything I've tried so far has failed. I'm going to put all the original components back in in a bit (old graphics card, take the extra RAM out), and if that doesn't work, then I'll need to take a hard drive with a Windows installation out of one of the other computers around the house and stick it in. Obviously if that doesn't work, I'm buggered, and so the new build will go straight ahead.

And hurry up with your pics, !K_A!! I want to see this sexy beast of yours.

I built my baby yesterday, and I've spent today transferring files and installing the most important programs (web browser, f'rinstance).

The only problem I had was with fans - the computer won't start if I have all seven fans connected to the PSU with molex, which is a bit annoying, so I need to find some molex to three pin adaptors.

I'll update this thread with pictures when I've got my phone drivers installed.