Pc Upgrades. Confused myself.

[Ste150]

Hey,

I'm upgrading my computer. Finally. Over time, its become pretty damn old, and now I'm fed up enough to do something!

My current PC is:

Athlon XP 2500 (O/C to be a 3200)
1 gig ram (ddr, not ddr2)
cheap pc chips mobo (no pci-e, sata etc)
Nvidia fx5600 graphics card (agp, obviously)
various hard drives and cd drives.


Now i can keep as much or as little of this stuff as i need to, the rest of it will go on ebay or to friends.

My budget is a definite sub £400 job. But around 350 is preferable as im stretching my student budget enough as it is.

Originally, my upgrade spec included a quad core intel (the q6600) but it proved to work out too expensive.(And my reading up told me dual vs quad has little impact atm) I've also skimped on the graphics card for the moment, cause ill be able to upgrade it eventually if needed (unlike with my current system) and it should play most current and older games reasonably, which will be a big improvement over now! (if not tell me :P)
With all this tinkering and adjusting, I've kinda got confused about the best deal i can get.

Without further ado and brackets, this is what I've come up with:

intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130484)
Heatsink (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/105994)
Gig of crucial ram (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/119273)
250gb sata hard drive (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131300)
8600GT graphics card (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/127346)
Gigabyte GA-G31MX-S2 Mobo (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132271)
XP (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/114048)(Included as my current copy of xp was oem and nicked from a laptop, so getting them to reactivate will proably not work)
Various cables im in need of (eg sata)

Total: £370

Now my question to you is... can you have a look though that and tweak if necessary?
Any help will be massively appreciated, and rewarded in heaven.
Thanks in advance :)

[Midget]

you really should go for 2gb of ram imo

but i'm no expert so, aside from that, i can't really help :p

[piemastermike]

2gb of ram (doesn't have to be crucial to save cost)
make sure the mobo has sound support
you probably won't need to upgrade your graphics card for a long time as those 8600s are super good value for money!

[Ste150]

woops forgot to mention i've got a sound card already (But yes it has onboard anyway me thinks)
Yeah i cut it down to 1 gig to save some money but maybe its worth the extra cash. Shall try and get some cheaper stuff.

Good news about the graphics card. To be honest, I'm going to be happy with anything that means i don't have to play stuff on minimum settings :p

thanks

EDIT TO THE MAX

Does anyone know if that processor will actually work with the motherboard?

I assumed it would cause the mobo supports the same fsb and is the same socket, but reviews of the cpu say it only works with p35 boards or something. Now im not sure.

[MargateMan]

Hm, not sure about the one you found, but this appears to be the same processor and definitely will fit that mobo
http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=284279&CatId=2701
But that one states its a 775 pin processor, not sure if Intel do different flavours of their processors.