Timberelf

I'm about to get ready to get myself a new system, but right now I am a few years back on knowldge on the new trhings that is out atm, ie core duo stuff.
I'm checking out stuff and plan to order from newegg.com and or tigerdirect (town and area I am in suck and doesnt have any place that sells parts like there is in New York).
I'm intresting in building a gaming system, with an ability to support dual vid cards, 2 to 3 hard drives, and not sure if this is really good or not, but someone mention *Liquid cooling*
Any imouts / suggestion from anyone..?

Also if it could cook dinner, take out the dogs, pick up the kids and clean the house would be a good too

Sixee

Liquid cooled systems always make me nervous, when I hear about them. There's something scary about having liquid near electricity that I can't seem to get over.

I would look for anything that can handle up to 4 gigahertz processor speed, dual PCI Express outputs for the video, and 4 gigs of memory....

Serial ATA drives are the way to go, nowdays. The seek, read/write times are only surpassed by solid state hard drives. Solid state drives are a bit pricier, and only come in a max of 64 gigs, so you may steer clear of those, unless price is no object....

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Jedd Corpse

If you want a custom built PC that you can either piece together or have chosen with the best specs for you, check out Cyberpowerpc.com

Just ordered a monster of a system for under $1,300.00

This was the best price I found outside of making the computer myself.

Sanchek

With the newer chips running at lower clock speeds and having more advanced manufacturing processes behind them (what's it at now? 65nm?), liquid cooling really isn't something you'll need.

I/O (RAM and HD) is usually where the most system performance is bottlenecked, aside from the 3D performance depending on your video.

With RAM, pay attention to the timings. If your FSB is 800mhz and you buy RAM that runs at 1066mhz, it clocks down to match the FSB anyway, while tighter timings improve performance at any bandwidth. Usually, you can buy slower RAM (that still matches your FSB) with tighter timings, and gain performance over the "faster" choice.

Timberelf

A friend at work suggested this chip http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...?EdpNo=3274083

Sanchek

The Conroe chips are excellent chips. Just make sure you get memory that'll run at tight timings at 667mhz, to get the best performance out of it. This is good stuff, for example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227271

Akom of Cazic Thule

Intel is killing AMD right now. Even the Phenom is not doing so hot. I too recommend the Conroe chips right now for "bang for the buck". If you want to go with a 1333 FSB, get a 6#50 series. If you're going to go with a 1066 FSB, go with a 6#00 series. DDR2 667 supports a 1333 FSB or you could get a DDR3 mobo with DDR3 1333 ram (pricey though). Likewise DDR2 533 will do 1066, or you can get DDR3 1066.

Hard drives: Set up a couple reasonably cheap SATA2 hard drives in a raid0. Get whatever is good but still cheap. You're not going to get huge performance benefits from different hard drives unless you want to drop a lot of cash. If you do, however, get 2 10k Raptors and Raid0 them. OR... if you really want ot spend some money, get an iRAM drive (or comparable) and drop as much cheap ram in it as you can (I think they have some that support 8 two gig chips) and load your OS and your main game on that, then Raid0 two cheap hard drives for storage. I'll be doing that eventually... when I can afford it hehe.

As to Video Cards, don't get the 8800GTX. If you're going to drop $500 on a video card, the 9800GX2 series is just around the corner. Wait for it. Even if its not all that great, the 8800 series cards will drop in price. If you're going to buy a card now, you have two choices. If you're getting two cards off the bat, should probably get the 8800GT 512 MB. Good card, does almost as well as the GTX. If you're going to get one card, you could get the 8800 GTS 512. Note: ONLY the 512mb GTS (newest GTS) is a good card. The other GTS's... not so hot. The 8800GT 512mb will run you $220 - $260 each. The 8800GTS will run $300 - $320 unless you find a deal somewhere. The 8800GTS 512MB actually outperforms the GTX in some applications, and is not very far behind it in the rest. The GT isn't all that far behind the GTS, though, so if you're looking to save money and are only getting one card, thats a viable option as well.

OS: Unless you have a viable reason to go Vista, get XP 64 bit. If you do get Vista, make sure you get the 64 bit. Standard 86x (32bit) versions of Windows only support ~3.5 GB of ram (even if you put 4+ in, thats all it sees). You will eventually be putting 4+ GB of ram in your system; you might as well prepare for it now (and get it now if you can).

I went with Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit on my system for a couple reasons. One: Media Center. I really like it. I really wanted it. Two: I work for an "IT Solutions" company, and eventually some of our clients will be switching to Vista. A couple of them already have Vista machines in their offices. I need to know it and there's no better way to learn that to install it and use it.

So... unless you want / need Media Center, get XP for your gaming rig. That said, I haven't experienced any major issues with Vista, so if you do decide to go with it, its not as bad as people make it out to be.

Sanchek

That's a good point about the OS.

It's definitely worthwhile to get Vista x64 for a nice machine these days. I replaced my Vista x86 with x64 recently, and it's night and day with 8gb.

Palarran

If you go with a RAID 0 array, make sure you have a solid backup system for any important files. Actually, you should have a solid backup system regardless, but if you have a system with two hard drives where the failure of either drive means data loss, that's obviously riskier than a single hard drive.

Don't cut corners on the power supply, and consider a UPS if you don't have one already.

This is all from personal experience.

Cados Evilsbane

I have been suffering in some ways lately with Vista 64 due to limited drivers for certain devices (i.e. Linksys, which as far as I know still only has Vista 32 drivers so I had to use some other half-bit other company driver to get my wireless card functioning), flash support in browsers (but 32-bit browsers within Vista 64 handle Flash fine), etc. But as previously mentioned the pros outweigh the cons performance-wise.

In the end I like Vista 64 (Dreamscene is awesome on Ultimate).

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