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Here’s the computer I hope to build. Any criticism and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I’m building this partly as a media machine, so I want it to be able to play 1080p video perfectly (and store a lot of them), partly as a machine to work on when I’m at home (plugging in 6 cables to my MacBook Pro every time I get home is far too much hassle), and partly as a gaming machine, since I hope to actively participate in FragSoc next year. I want it to at least be able to play most games that have already come out on medium-high (high on things like TF2, but I’m not so fussed about Crysis), and be able to cope with upcoming high-profile releases (Portal 2 etc.).

Case: Coolermaster Storm Scout (£68.73) [Already purchased with the PSU for £119.14]

I love this case – I’ve had it for a few weeks now with the guts of an old P4 that I got from CompRec. It’s very spacious inside and has 5 3.5″ drive bays and 5 5.25″ drive bays, which can easily be converted into 3.5″ ones.

PSU: Coolermaster Silent Pro M700 (£82.49) [Already purchased with the case for £119.14]

Massive overkill for my needs – but it was cheap in the Case + PSU deal from Ebuyer so I went for it. It’s modular, which is lovely, though I’m going to need a lot of splitters when I get more HDDs as the supplied cables are quite short. As the name suggests, it’s silent (unless you stick your ear against it, of course).

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P55-US3L Rev 2.0 H55 Socket 1156 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard (£72.76)

I don’t know much about motherboards, and this is the first one that met my requirements – lots of SATA ports (it has 8) and 16GB RAM capacity (in case I ever get rich). The rest is inconsequential. Reviews have been good and in my experience Gigabyte are reliable with their mobos, so it looks like a safe buy.

Graphics Card: PALIT 9800GT Green Edition 1GB GDDR3 VGA DVI HDMI Out PCI-E Graphics Card (£85.63)

I know diddly squat about graphics cards – I left choosing this up to the reviews I’d read, though I have no real idea how good it is, and I’ve never heard of Palit. If anyone has any better suggestions (which aren’t ridiculously expensive), I’d love to hear them.

Processor: Intel Core i5 750 2.66GHz Socket LGA1156 8MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor (£167.71)

I’m fairly certain this is the processor I want. I love Intel, and this is pretty much the best thing for my price bracket. Getting an i7 would simply be overkill, and from what I’ve heard this is very overclockable (if I ever decide to overlock it).

I’m not going to bother including RAM, DVD drive and HDDs, as they are pretty standard components with little deviation between products.