Building a desktop

[Valkyrie]

I'm hoping to have enough money soon to build a reasonably good system, but for the life of me I have zero knowledge on how to build one or wheat parts will make a great desktop. My budget is £550/$870.

 

[Quixoticism]

A basic list of good parts.
Intel Core i5-2400/2500 with a matching motherboard
AMD 6870/nVidia 460
4GB DDR3 Ram
650 Watt Power Supply
A hard drive
Case

 

[Ennui]

$870 is a good solid budget. You don't need any peripherials, just the computer itself right? (do you already have monitor, mouse, keyboard etc?)

I would go with an i5 760 or a Phenom II X4 970 like I have, depending on your preference of Intel or AMD. Gigabyte makes great, cheap motherboards, you will want socket AM3. 4GB of DDR3 is good, 1333 or 1600 speed.

Video card, I would go with Nvidia at the moment. Depends on what CPU/mobo you get to see how much you can spend on a card, but they are a bit more bang for your buck than ATI right now IMO.

 

[Valkyrie]

Should have said this earlier, I'm going to us it for gaming and media. If there are any "really" good websites for this; could you please link me. Thanks

 

[Valkyrie]

Was looking at pre-built websites and found this, it looks quite good for the price and gives me enough money for other stuff. Have no idea if this is bad or good though; could someone please help?
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/pc/range/iconquer.html

 

[JFry]

That is basically the same system I have except that I have an i-3 and my graphics card is the 200 series of the listed graphics card (240 I think). The only games I have played on it are starcraft 2 and mass effect 1 & 2, but they all run smoothly at maxed settings.
I would expect the system you linked to be able to play all but possibly the most demanding games at maxed settings.