Nice..
..that wont be stable running 365days a year though... Certainly not on that budget.

I've an i5 3570k running @ 4.2Ghz, SSD and 8GB of dual channel RAM for less than £600

Yeah, Im already running an SSD.
Since i reduced my mem from 16gb to 8gb its slow as hell.

^^^ what he said!

I have an SSD in my 2011 MacBook Pro and although it was quick with the old hard drive in it, the SSD makes it load apps stupidly quick now - and it's only got 4GB RAM.

I've also ordered an SSD for my new desktop PC too, and I'll probably buy one for my wife's MBP for Christmas too to help her do things quicker in the various Adobe apps she uses :lol:

[Edited on 06-11-2012 by Sam]

SSD's are the single biggest performance upgrade in 10 years I think. Using any kind of PC with a mechanical drive, no matter how powerful, is just painfully slow in comparison. :)

The average home computer seems to require less power these days than it did a few years ago. Windows seems to be loosing it's Aero look and MS are going down the route where desktop stuff is created in HTML5 and JS. Apple are making their computers more 'lightweight' too. You aren't going to need 64GB of RAM and a 3.4GHz processor to future-proof yourself. There are smarter ways of making your computer faster too, a good quality SSD will give you a massve performance boost.

I want to semi futureproof it too.

My last build wasnt a bad spec, But the mobo has gona bit dodgy so i had to remove one gfx card and half my mem.

16GB is a good amount of RAM, especially with how cheap it is currently. I find with 8GB I can often be using 80%+, so 16GB would give a nice margin.

I'd go with the i5 over the i7, you wont see any real benefit with that kind of use, and only a handful of programs can make use of 8 threads. It's a lot of extra money you can put towards a better graphics card and an SSD.

fucking hell and I thought my 2.4Ghz intel core 2 duo macbook with 4gb ram and an SSD was quick :lol:

We have some nice units at work, the base spec comes with 96gb ram and twin Xeon's :lol:

I've specced a new Core i7 system for someone that's going to use it for music production and that is only about £600-£700.

£1000 for the odd bit of gaming and encoding? Sounds overkill, can get a Microserver for £110 after £100 rebate, then budget £500-600 for a gaming / encoding machine, save yourself a few hundred

running 24/7.
Odd bit of gaming, Folding, Encoding,
Photoshop and acting as a server for my HTPCs

We've got some computers at work which are pretty high end, though we've only got 16GB of memory and quad core Xeons in them.

what are you using it for?

Wow, its been about 4 years since my last computer build.

Now you can get off the shelf intel 6core processors running 3.9ghz.
Supporting 64gb mem!

Looks like you could knock a barebone system up for sub £1k too.

Has anyone used a machine like this yet?...