hahahahahaha
Well ive just read a few ways to waste £500!!!!!!!!!
And whats all this bullshit about conroes not being good? The E6700 is faster than an FX62 in every benchmark!!
I personally would not buy a new PC right now at all. Vista is just around the corner, and you are going to need a stand-alone graphics card for that.
As for sound cards, unless you have some amazing PC speakers, such as the Logitech Z-5500's then dont bother. On a good motherboard onboard will more than suffice.
As for graphics cards, you can buy a card that costs £30 but really there is no point at all if you ever want to play a current let alone next gen PC game on even medium settings.
When building a new pc, you need to decide what its for. If you want it for games, then DO NOT BUY ONE YET!!! I REPEAT DO NOT BUY ONE YET!!!! Vista is just around the corner with direct X 10 which means much better graphics, and we are still awaiting AMD's response to quad core! Yes i said quad core, because thats what we are on now people, forget duel core, thats going the same way as skt 939 processors ie obsolete!
If you just want a good fast general PC, and are not interested in playing games, then go for the following.
E6300 or E6400 conroe processor
2 gig of DDR 2 memory,
A branded motherboad eg Asus, Abit, DFI, Epox etc (none of this asrock shite)
And a Nvidia 7900gs
Finally and most importantly get a decent power supply. Spend at least £40 on a branded 500watt + PSU. Ives seen too many PCs destroyed by cheap PSU's!!
But if you can hang on at all, Do not buy a PC now, quad core is soon to become mainstream and prices will drop with the arrival of vista in January. And if you want direct X 10 with Vista you will need a direct X 10 GPU!