I desperately need to upgrade my pc as 3 years of x360 and more recently PS3 has made me forget all about my once loved gaming beast which is now chugging along like a zx spectrum.

If i can remember how to build a pc (its been that long) I also really havent been keeping an eye on the PC specifications and componants game so have no idea whats good or not (i didnt even realise we were on GF10 graphics cards or whatever they are now.. and I almost fell of my chair when i found 4 gig of reasonable ram only costs £40 these days.......)

I want to do a bit of gaming (crysis - i cant wait), lots of storage needed but really I need space so a shuttle style case.

Was thinking the following. (follow links)

Case - NZXT Rogue

Graphics Card - XpertVision nVidia GeForce 9800GTX+ 512MB DDR3

Memory - Corsair 4 GB

I have heard that XP pro does not support 4gb Ram only 2? is this right so may go for vista ultimate.

Mobo - Gigabyte

Processor -Intel
HDD - Hitachi 500gb

Looks ok to me, i have a few spares from my old heap, drives, cables, 600w PSU etc.

Any comments or suggestions, can you spot any probs? May be tempted to go AMD as they are way cheaper for a quad-core but not sure of the benefits.

I have about £600 to blow from my interest free pc loan at work. ;-)

Looks to me like you're going for high end parts. I don't know enough about games to know if this will play your game. Personally I prefer AMD.

As for the 4 gb of ram, yes Xp doesn't support all of it but it can use most of it. However Vista doesn't support that much either, at least not the 32-bit version, but the 64 bit version does. This is a hardware problem & it has nothing to do with the OS. I don't know if XP 64-bit has support for that much ram. Also there can be driver & software incompatibilities with both the XP & Vista 64 bit versions. Something to keep in mind.

I don't know if you noticed but this mother board has on board graphics.

I found some reviews on the MB at Newegg. Something else to consider. Your PSU will need to have a 4-pin CPU power cable which it probably does if it is pretty recent.

Just to add to the RAM and 64-bit OS's, I believe that the CPU also has to be 64-bit as well, makes sense that you need a hardware to match the software.

the core 2 duo is a 64-bit processor & yes a 64-bit OS must go on a 64-bit computer but not the other way around.

Yeah i was thinking the Mobo was a weak link cos it was cheap, i may well double the budget there and go for something inthe £100 region.