In responce to rip-off's comment the Xmas avatar is now in full effect; fear it!

*chuckles*

Thanks also to those to Rick, Daerax and Jack for the congrats on the job :)
Amusingly after accepting the job I got a couple more offers of interviews, however after deciding that as cool as MOD VR work would be I wanted to stay in games and that Zoe Mode's offer was better than the other alternative (by GBP1K/pa and 5 days holiday a year.; yep, 25 days holiday which is apprently 5 days above the industry norm.) I'm very much fixed on heading Brighton Bound... now, all I need todo is sort out somewhere to live between now and the 7th during the time when the UK is closed for a week over Xmas; fun times *chuckles*

Now, onto the UberOverPowered PC;

Firstly, there appears to be some failing at maths around gamedev of late with regards to the ram issue... The ram modules come as pairs of 2Gig stick, and there are 2 pairs, so yes, it is 8gig of DDR3 RAM @1.6Ghz [grin]

Now, when it comes to the OS, I happen to have a spare copy of Vista Ultimate laying about my room which has been saved for a machine just like this [grin]

The plan has infact changed a bit since the screen shot was taken. After a conversation about RAID hardware with a friend on MSN we reached the conculsion that the setup was sorely lacking; thus a 3ware 9650SE-4LPML hardware SATA PCI-E raid card was added [grin]

Of course, this means more storage space was required, so we are now up to 4 1TB hard drives. I'm still trying to decide if the 150gig Raptor is required, as in certain raid configurations (and "software"/onboard raid at that) 4 Seagate 7200.11 drives can supply a higher average through put, they just lack a bit on seek time.

On Jack's charge of the 8800GTX's not being good enough, I agree, however they are still the fastest cards you can get, when NV releases their highend G92 part these will be replaced [razz]

On the CPU issue, well you can blame Scan for not stocking anything faster than the 3.0Ghz chip [razz] This is probably because it hasn't been released beyond paper as yet [grin]

So, from Scan.co.uk the price list looks at follows;


However, despite adding 2 hard drive the price has hardly gone up, this is because the cost of the LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive has dropped by about GBP40 and the price of the 8800GTX have dropped by over GBP50 each!

Of course, with the addition of the hardware RAID card it's infact GBP244.99 more than shown in the picture, thus the current total is; GBP4,861.21

Bah! ~GBP140 short of GBP5K [sad]

Anyways, the next question was; hey! how much would this cost to put together in the USA?

To newegg.com!

Unfortunately the same mobo couldn't be found, instead the WiFi version had to be brought instead; also newegg.com doesn't stock Dell monitors it seems [sad]


So, $6,828.88... I'm pretty surprised about this, as normally the USD price is close to the UK price in pounds; could this be a side effect of the exchange rate?

However, for now we'll have to go with what we've got and do some maths;
xe.com give the exchange as GBP1 = $2.04, so the price in UK is; GBP3,344.18. So, only about GBP1500 cheaper than in the UK and we still need to get a monitor for around ~GBP800...

Now, on imported goods you have to pay import tax, which iirc runs at 5% for electrical goods from the USA;
GBP3,344.18 * 1.05 = GBP3,511.39
Next, the joy of VAT;
GBP3,511.39 * 1.175 = GBP4,125.88

So, approximately GBP700 less, but we still have a monitor to pay for and I suspect shipping everything from the USA to the UK is going to be ALOT for shipping.

So, in the end, it doesn't look like it would be worth trying; ah well [grin]