dude, i care deeply for your bargain-basement PC gratification, so I implore you to follow my advice. If you get a 555 BE instead of a 550, you’ll not only be able to save $100 but you’ll also have a good chance of magically transforming it into a quadcore cpu:
I thought you could unlock the 550 into a quad?
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Maybe, I thought it was just the 555, but I don’t really care because I have an i7. Read the link that says how to do it.
I love the support from you guys, but sifting through different opinions can be a bitch 
Ok…
Case: Casecom 6788 Black Mid Tower, 120mm Blue Front Fan – £26
Psu: 750W Powercool 80+ Dual 12v Rail V2.2 High Efficiency – £47
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD3P AMD 790X – £86
Processor: AMD Phenom x2 550 Black Edition – £71
Ram: Kingston 2gb (2x1gb) Ddr2 1066mhz – £25
Gpu: HD4850 1Gb – £80
Hdd: 750Gb Seagate Barracuda – £59
DVD drive: Samsung 20x dvd-rw – £9
TOTAL: £403
The only thing I want to change now is a slightly cheaper motherboard. Like people have said, Asus is tempting. Sorry to leach of you guys, but I lose the plot when it comes to mobos, I have no idea.
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You can’t go wrong with ASUS, just get a board with 4 dimm slots so that when you’re upgrading the memory, you don’t have to throw out your old ram.
I made the mistake of getting the cheapest mobo possible and now I’m stuck with only 2 slots and I have to use expensive ram in order to keep my CPU overclocked to the max.
Should I feel accomplished that I haven’t posted my specs yet in this thread?
The specs of your PC would be just as unrelated to the topic as the post you just made.
Yes, very. Have a cookie. You can have 2 if don’t mention them replying to this post too
EDIT: Guys, reckon this board will do the job? https://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-M4A77D-AMD-770-S-AM3-PCI-E-(x16)-DDR2-1200(OC)-SATA-II-SATA-RAID-ATX
I can haz cookie now rite?
An ASUS P5E or P5Q would be a cheap, reliable 775 mobo. I used to have a P5E and I can personally say thats its a great mobo for overclocking and it can support two vid cards @ x16 speed, but it only supports CrossfireX.
he’s searching mainboard for an [COLOR=‘Green’]AMD [COLOR=‘Red’]NOT [COLOR=‘DeepSkyBlue’]Intel
@siggs: I think yes, but check if this mobo can unlock cpu cores
EDIT: yes it can
btw, I spend some more money and bought this, it can disable, enable and unlock cores
That mobo is quite alot more :S I’ve heard you can only unlock some of the older cpu’s, they’ve since changed something? But I’m not too bothered if I can’t 
Also, I know the board I picked doesn;t support any form of crossfire/sli Again, I’m not too bothered there. It’s not likely I’ll ever have the money to double up
So, final spec is;
Monitor and keyboard/mouse is not a problem, I’ll get on that myself. Thanks for all the help guys
Siggs
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I’m pretty sure you can still unlock core’s, but as I wrote it before, some core’s are locked for a reason, so don’t get annoyed when your system gets unstable with unlocked cores.
you’ll have to try which core’s are useable and which are broken