£500 build, advice needed

[xenepp]

It's been a long time since I built one of these machines and I'm now selling the MBP and getting a desktop instead so now I'm wondering what sort of hardware I should be buying. Obviously I want to get the best machine I can gameing's not an issue for me so what should I get?

 

I know I want an SSD (64gb will do) and I'm factoring in a 23" LCD so that's about £260 gone already.

 

I'm thinking a Gigabyte board, Radeon and a C2D, but which will give me the best bang for my buck and be out-of-the-box compatible with 10.6 retail?

 

There's so much info here that I'm a bit confused and frankly, if someone thinks they have a machine that I might like then speak up

[EricM]

It's been a long time since I built one of these machines and I'm now selling the MBP and getting a desktop instead so now I'm wondering what sort of hardware I should be buying. Obviously I want to get the best machine I can gameing's not an issue for me so what should I get?

 

I know I want an SSD (64gb will do) and I'm factoring in a 23" LCD so that's about £260 gone already.

 

I'm thinking a Gigabyte board, Radeon and a C2D, but which will give me the best bang for my buck and be out-of-the-box compatible with 10.6 retail?

 

There's so much info here that I'm a bit confused and frankly, if someone thinks they have a machine that I might like then speak up :censored2:

Yikes! $350 US is a VERY small amount of money to work with on a computer. You will DEFINITELY need to save up more than that unless you want something with the ATOM or go all used components off of various sites. If you didn't need a monitor or a SSD... you could have a fairly decent build($700US could get you some nice components). As for the Core 2 and LGA775, don't buy them. They're old tech now and on the way out. I would look into Gigabyte P55M-UD2 and a supported processor for osx86. I would suggest the i5-750 as thats the only one supported out of the i5s and i3s as of now. So if your wanting a new system entirely, buy LGA1156 or LGA1366.