OpenOffice does support MS formats, just not perfectly. If you need perfect though then fine. $140 is very steep, can't you get some sort of OEM version or discounted through school/college/work or something like that?

The GPUs might take a little longer to show up. I'm guessing a week more? If you need the computer now then buy now of course.

In the UK, you can get heavily discounted MS software (e.g. win 7 Pro and  Office 2010 Pro for under £40 each) through Software 4 Students. The only pre-requisite is that you have to be the guardian of one or more children of school age, although I don't think there's much of a check on that. Might be worth seeing if they do something similar in Australia.

I figured since you're building a PC for family use, you really ought to buy what you need rather than use the entirety of the budget. So I went with something which wasn't over the top in terms of performance but which would work very well for what you wanted to do with it.

The GPU well, its overpowered from a casual perspective but its just right if you feel like just putting the game on and cranking the settings to max and not worrying about it. You could cut that in half if you wanted and use an HD 5770 for $160 but since you had the budget for it, why not get something decent? The reason why the CPU is so much different to Intel is because Intel have a monopoly and their CPUs are faster. However I doubt you really need that performance so the Phenom is the best quad core for the money.

That GPU is on special and so is the HD 5770 below it for $160. The thing is I cannot say how long you'll have to wait for the HD 6xxx series to come out and what their performance / price ratio is going to be like because the price is likely to be fairly high anyway. I know that the announcement date is in 7 days (American time) on the 19th but availability is an open question. Since I didn't know, I figured it was best to use what was there rather than make assumptions, especially when you could end up waiting a few weeks without getting more than 10% extra value from the incoming GPUs.

OpenOffice can open and save in .doc, .ppt, .xls, etc. Compatibility shouldn't be an issue, but I do find that MS Office has a nicer interface. It's worth a try, especially when a new copy of Office costs so much.

No. The AMD6850 is about the same speed as the 5830, the AMD6870 is about the speed of an 5850.

I'm curious as to what you think of the following configuration for the price?

http://www.altech.com.au/nrg/Frost.asp?update=1:11:15 PM

-Benefits; overclocked Core i5 @3.8GHz, haven't seen benchmarks comparing the Ati 5850's vs 460's so I can't say which is better performance wise, but the nvidia cards are easy to setup for 3D gaming, which may be a draw.

The HD 5850s are definately the faster of the two. Anyway it looks like pretty decent value for a performance system that is also prebuilt. The biggest question marks would be heat, noise and reliability. It might be very noisy or it might be very hot, hard to say.

you do realise that the 6850 and the 6870 are equivalent to the 5750 and 5770 right? and according to the sketchy leaked synth benches http://en.expreview.com/2010/10/11/amd-radeon-hd-6800-benchmarks-surface/10638.html 6870 = 5870 and 6850 ~ 5850, so yea what's your point?

I said "in the same price". Barts (6850/6870 according to rumour) should be like $200 US replacing a $260 5850. That kind of thing.

AMD just screwed up the naming. The '6870' is what should be called the 6770 and the real 6870 is Cayman which will offer performance ~30% higher than the 5870 and be called the 6970 (again rumour) and at the top a dual Cayman, Antilles, which will be a '6990'.

If nothing else then the release of 6xxx should drop the price of 5xxx significantly.

Perf/mm^2 has gone up by about 20-30% so they should be able to drop the price by the same amount, if they actually had any competition from Nvidia which they don't.

Actually according do Dave Baumann, the mistake was the 58xx series. Barts is correcting a mistake already made, it isn't a mistake in itself. Its the 5870 which doesn't fit into the sweet spot strategy for their high end chip, it is far too large.