Out of Pod Experience

Core i3 2120, 4gb ram, gtx 560 is more than sufficient to run eve at max.

Currently, I'm running an i5-960 with 8 GB of PC1600 DDR3 RAM, and a radeon 6870HD. I do quite well with this setup, but there's only a handful of situations where the FPS was below 60 FPS.

With a budget of £1,500, you should be set.

I run Win 7, have a single GTX 580, an i5 2500k @3.8GHz (quad core), 8 GB DDR3 SDRAM, and a recent model Crucial SSD. I can't speak for dual-clienting on two monitors as I haven't bought a second monitor yet, but I can certainly run Chrome, EVEMon, pyfa, Photoshop, and two EVE client instances (at max graphics) without any noticeable graphics lag, even in blobs of 100+ or during very busy mission scenes.

I also find that windowed mode is much less susceptible to graphics lag than fullscreen mode.

You could afford approximately the same rig I have with your budget. I can guarantee you that with a setup similar to mine, you needn't worry about your EVE performance.

get the I5 2500k processor
Nvidia 560ti
small SSD and a main datadrive, iirc eve likes SSDs.

however, eve doesnt need much to run
the I5 will ensure in the future you can run well
Nvidia 560ti is a good card and will keep u running eve for a long time, in the future u might be able to use it as a physx card as well ( like that matters though)
SSD makes your computer fast to start up and load times decrease drastically.

Depends what you usually do in EVE and how many accounts you want to play at the same time.

If you're mostly carebearing and the most "loaded" scene you get to see is Jita undock, then 1500 GBP is way overkill, even for two accounts.
If you're at least sometimes doing massive fleeetfights out in 0.0, a 1500 GBP budget will probably not be enough for a smooth enough experience during one such massive engagement even for a single account.

GPU-wise, a 460 from the "v2" generation should be enough in general, even in CQ, if you run a single client.
CPU-wise, that's where it can get hairy in fleet combat with everything enabled. Single core performance is more important than total combined CPU power in this case.
If you turn down some of the bling though (drones primarily), the CPU ceases to be a problem even on a cheaper setup.

A SSD is good to have all around, but its usefulness for EVE is questionable.
One single EVE instance will not go much over 2 GB of RAM even with cache enabled, so oversizing the RAM in case you run a single client will not do you much good unless you also run a truckload of other junk on the side at the same time. With a bit of spartan memory usage, even 4 GB of total RAM should borderline suffice for two EVE instances, let alone a single one. But RAM is quite cheap these days, so, heck, go wild.


Overall, I'd say 2500k with 8 GB of RAM and a single 560 Ti (I'd recommend a mildly factory-overclocked Gigabyte one, but whatever you like), add a Z68 motherboard of your choosing (ATX preferable over mATX, and go cheap, you only need a single x16 PCI-E slot anyway, screw SLI capabilities), a HDD as large as comfortable with (HDDs are still a bit expensive after last fall's floods), a GOOD quality 550W PSU (modular recommended), a nicely ventillated case, maybe also a mid-sized SSD for the OS+game if you like, and it should be quite sufficient and well within your budget even with the SSD.

A screen won't prevent you from bringing a game back to fullscreen.

Should probably look at other causes >_>

1) My Q6600 is doing quite fine, thank you.
2) I've been thinking about a 570 Ti actually, good to see my own research validated. Thanks.
3) I'm doing fine without one (OK, its a hybrid drive, but that's really just a large glorified cache). If you're truly serious get a PCIe SSD.
4) Agree 150% Also some decent thermal paste, Arctic Silver is still the mainstay but I've seen others mentioned recently. Apparently there's one using diamonds now?
5) I seriously wish the Cosmos was still being sold, or at least in Mid-tower format. Best decision I've made in years was to get that case, but God its huge.