[Bubba]

Hard drives sure are getting cheap - a 1 TB mirrored RAID array would be mighty nice to keep all my music, etc on.

[GCW]

Yeah, I'm tempted to get a couple of 750GB drives as per Uncle's suggestion.
Ordered various bits today so should be getting somewhere soon.
Any particular DVD drives I should consider?

[GCW]

Just a quick update.  Got all the bits a few days ago and finally had a chance to put things together.  Ended up with:
PSU 650W, 12cm fan   
Thermalite Soprano SECC case (3 decent fans and plenty of space for extras later)
Asustek S775 Intel P35 ATX (P5KC) motherboard
Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz
2x 1GB Elixir 1024MB DDR2 667 PC5300                
Graphics: 512 Gigabyte GeForce 8800GT            
Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Music   
Western Digital Caviar S300 16MB 7200rpm 750GB
Pioneer 18x CD/DVD/RAM         

Everything is recognised in BIOS so all seems good so far.  No smoke came out when I powered it up too.  My copy of XP failled to install due to fatal error:  setup.dll is corrupt, apparently.  So I'm just acquiring a new version.  I'll let you all know how I get on when I get a chance to sort it.
Cheers for all your help.
Oh, and it's 720 quid all in (except monitor), for those of us that live in the world of VAT

[unclesomebody]

looking good. Although personally I would have bought faster ram as that is going to limit you a little. Why? Well, your processor should run at 3.2GHz without any major overclocking. Probably just a quick FSB change to 400 and you'll be away (with the possibility of a tiny bit more voltage). However, your ram won't run at 800MHz because it's cheaper/older etc. For £30 you could have bought some good DDR2 800MHz stuff and this would have given you the headroom to overclock a little. Now I am guessing that you're going to reply by saying that you don't want to overclock it. But what if you had been in a shop buying the Q6600 (2.4GHz) and the assistant had said to you "Hey, do you want to buy this other chip, the QX6850 (3.0GHz) for exactly the same price?" Any sane person would have said yes, and ultimately this is the situation you now find yourself in.

As for the rest, it looks monstrous. I would be interested to see some benchmarks if you ever get a chance. 

[Jim]

I did mention that earlier and it was only £2.34 more expensive for 2 1gig sticks of 800MHz.
I'm going to wait a bit longer to upgrade myself (probably just after uncle next upgrades)

[GCW]

Yeah, you did Jim but I'd already gone ahead and bought some.  Being blind I didn't see the faster RAM on offer 
That's something I may well address anyway at a later date.
Unc- I am quite aware of overclocking and that's partly why I went for a case with lots cooling.  Let me get it running and then I'll have more of a tinker.
Thanks again for your input.

[GCW]

Finally had time to get the system sorted last night.  For some reason I was getting a 0x50 error on XP install.  To cut a long story short, XP didn't like the RAM in the A1 and B1 slots, even with BIOS changes.  It works fine in the A1 and B2 slots.  The mobo recommends A1/B1 but hey.
So, things are installed- I'll get you some stats when I get a chance Unc, probably next week.

As an aside, if i decide to opt for RAID later, do I need to re-install the OS etc or can I still run it from its own partition?

[GCW]

Basic performance prior to overclocking etc.  Let down by RAM, as expected.