I bought a 'Bundle' from a company called Novatech.
Intel Core 2 Duo E8200, 2048MB 667Mhz DDR2 RAM, Heatsink And Fan, MSI Intel P35 Motherboard.
I also bought a Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 graphics card with 512MB of RAM, not very good for gaming, but it does play HD Video, has dual monitor output, passive cooling (no noisey fan) and is cheap.
I can use some of the bits from my old PC, my SATA II 400Gb & 80Gb HDD, DVD writer and dual monitors etc.
I put it all together at the weekend and after a bit of messing about, managed to get it working OK (well, it is my job ;-) ). I had to slipstream a SP2 version of XP though, don't ask.
It's nice and fast, I can now run things through Registax more than twice as fast. :-) and it's great for handling chunky Canon RAW files. The graphics card also plays HD 1080i as well, so I've been watching some of this:- NASA HD Video.
Here's the benchmark for my old CPU. ... and my new CPU.
My old PC is not actually on the new CPU graph.
Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 graphics card.
