for around £20 a g400 is the best youll get. dont be taken aback because it doesnt have sparkly packaging with "gaming" slapped all over it. its the best for your buck, pretty much guaranteed.

youll notice a considerable boost in games with the 2500k, especially when you overclock it. probably in the region of 20 extra fps in most games.

another kool kid with too much money to spend. turn around too quickly and whack your backpack into a lamppost and say bye to that $1250.

soon as you find that psu is too weak, then the whole system is useless as you probably cant fit another into that case. with a desktop then youd just have a $60 upgrade, with an x51 you need a whole new pc.

soon as you want a new processor, whole system is useless again because finding a motherboard that will fit it will be a nightmare, especially in a couple of years when they arent producing x51's any more. so you need to buy a whole new pc again while the desktop owner just buys a new mobo/cpu

when you do upgrade, that case is gonna be completely useless. with a desktop you could keep the same case for 10 years but as soon as youve upgraded your x51 as far as you can the only place for that case would be the rubbish bin.

to the post above;

we arent just offering this advice for the good of our health, we are doing it because we know he will waste alot of money and effort with the x51.

you dont need to spend much. i use a freezer 7 pro, its very cheap but 4.5ghz no problem on a 2500k

like others have said, you can gain more performance in games by buying a new cpu.

an overclocked 2500k with a gtx 285 will max most games quite easily i expect.

a gtx560 with a q6600 wouldnt.

your cpu is excessive for games. it is only worth the price if you are making videos and that kind of thing. a 2500k will do you fine. use the money for a better graphics card and then overclock the 2500k when you get it.

All this and nothing hard-hitting as to why the 2500k is worth the $100 more. The Core-i3 being hyperthreaded allows it to keep up with quad-cores. In my opinion, the Core i3 merely seems like slight step down from the 2500k stock in terms of real world performance. Does the Core i3 not hold up as well in terms of framerate? My Core 2 Duo seems to have frequent framerate dips in BF3, if the Core-i3 does the same then I can understand, but if it holds up like a quad core then I really don't see why I'm putting out $100 more for other than a 4- 5fps increase.

Mystic-G

encoding stuff for youtube videos and all that kind of thing, the i5 will trash the i3 too.

backup what you need to, buy some thermal paste for your cpu, doesnt need to be expensive. watch a youtube video for how to take your cpu fan off and how to apply thermal paste.

aslong as you have your own keys to the software then you can download the program from a torrent site. windows wont let you download windows xp, they are much too money grubbing for that as they want you to upgrade. go to somewhere like thepiratebay. but like i say, this is only legal assuming you have already paid for the license for those software. if you got these programs when you got your pc, then you did pay for the license in the price for the pc.