I chose the 980x for the 6 cores, as I will be using this machine for development and design work, as well as gaming. the x price was £50 more than the 970 and has far more overhead to overclock if needed.

The total cost of the upgrades was just under the £3,000 mark, I was given the Z5500's for nothing (add another £500 for the existing case, SSD, PSU, Soundblaster X-Fi & 2x DVDRW's)


If you are looking just for a high speed gaming rig, look at the new sandybridge chips and motherboards, some people have had very good results taking them up to 4.3ghz on air cooling.

one item to take note of... don't bother buying an OC'd version of the GTX580, as all of them will quite happily go to insane speeds using MSI Afterburner Beta (just up the standard voltage from 1025 to around 1138 once you pass 850mhz)