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 :D

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....

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.

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.

A friend at work suggested this chip http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3274083

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/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227271

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.

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.

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.

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).

That should be mostly a thing of the past. Starting a few years ago, Microsoft stopped certifying a manufacturer's 32 bit device driver unless there's also a 64 bit version.

On a new machine, unless you buy some seriously shady parts, there should be no issue with Vista x64 (though, XP 64bit might be a different story).

Personally, I'd hold off on Vista until they get a service pack out. It's a cute OS, but it has some weird eccentricities that they need to work out. I've only played with it on my laptop - it came with my Dell. A few times I've updated the drivers, and it caused major problems, even going with recommended, certified drivers. Not to mention that the error message you'll get about the drivers is vague at best. There also seems to be some weird handling with wireless connections, and I've heard other users report the same thing - sometimes Vista likes my router, sometimes it doesn't.

Oh.. and don't be afraid of Vista because of the interface. As with previous versions of windows, you can make it look however you want. Mine looks like good ol' Win 98/2k, but thats what I'm used to.

Vista has worked flawlessly for me. Most of the bad press on it is FUD from people who haven't even used it as their daily OS.

Some people have trouble with XP too, and every other OS ever made by any company for any computer. The Vista hate on the Interwebs is just silly.

I dunno, any O/S that requires 1 gig of memory to just act right, bugs me. My laptop was a piece of crap with 500MB of ram installed. With Windows 2000 that would be enough to run the O/S 3 times over.

Mine looks an aweful lot like Win98 as well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who does that. I definately wouldn't recommend buying Vista for the Aero interface - that thing sucks up a lot of memory, and I eventually turned mine off. The OS shouldn't feel sluggish with 2 gig of system memory.

That should be mostly a thing of the past. Starting a few years ago, Microsoft stopped certifying a manufacturer's 32 bit device driver unless there's also a 64 bit version.

On a new machine, unless you buy some seriously shady parts, there should be no issue with Vista x64 (though, XP 64bit might be a different story).

http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_CASupport_C1&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1175230420666&packedargs=site%3DUS&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=2066629625B01

True for most things Sanchek, but some basic things (like what I mentioned earlier) are still a problem for Vista x64. I built my machine a couple months ago from all top range name-brand parts, and as my link above will prove, large companies like Linksys still don't even have basic Vista 64 support for most or even all major products (heck, not even 32-bit support for many). Linksys networking products are absolutely everywhere (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.), and them not supporting my brand new Wireless-G PCI card can be a minor nuisance on Vista 64. They just say "TBD" on all of their products, so I had to do a classic Google search fix and use Ralink product drivers to get my card to work (more or less).

I am not saying that Vista 64 is plagued with huge problems, in fact I absolutely love it. LOVE it! It runs like a dream on 4GB of DDR2 800 RAM (not to mention ReadyBoost using any flash drive), I am just saying that there are still some minor compatibility issues with the 64-bit system (although there shouldn't be; it is the individual companies' faults. Perhaps Microsoft should pull on the reins a little tighter where necessary =).

I bought a fully official, legally licensed retail full version copy of Vista Ultimate which comes with both the 32 and 64-bit discs (only paid $200, muahaha), but I jumped ahead to Vista 64 because I was willing to work out some of the still-existent pioneering issues.

P.S. One of the reasons Vista is such a memory hog is that it using a lot of memory to put vitals and loading stuff in the background so that you ideally don't have to wait long for things to load, etc. (as far as I understand). You are better off sticking at least 2GB in a system that uses it so as to avoid slow-down.

To contrast, I have a system about two years old (I built it when the Conroe chips very first came out) and it installed just as smooth as x86. Everything had a built in driver, except the video cards which had 64-bit drivers available for download.

I think it's increasingly unlikely to run into driver issues with x64 these days. It definitely doesn't hurt to check on the websites for your main components before installation though.

It's important to remember that the ~3gb ceiling is only part of the problem with x86. There are also limits to how much memory a single process can allocate under x86, and various performance increases from the wider pipe and more efficient instruction set. It's well worth any trouble it takes to get running smoothly.

I agree, any hurdles that need to be jumped to get 64-bit functioning is well worth it, because thanks to Google and glorious worldwide nerd-dom, there usually is a fix =).

I am thankful for the benefits of a 64-bit system.

Has the slow file copying thing been fixed with Vista?

That was the one thing that stuck out in my mind with my mom's new laptop about a year ago. Copying a large collection of files (~10,000) from one place to another on the same computer resulted in an estimated time to complete listed in days; I left it running overnight and it turned out the "days" estimate was accurate, as it still wasn't anywhere near done. (I think I had to reboot in order to cancel the file copy, too.)

I then zipped up the files and unzipped them in the new location and had it done in minutes.

(Edit: Actually, I think it wasn't copying from one location to another but from one laptop to another using 100 Mb/sec Ethernet. Still, zipping-and-unzipping was several orders of magnitude faster than direct copying.)

I never experienced that, but it must've been fixed at some point. I copied the contents of my program files directory over to a data drive before wiping x86 for x64, and it didn't take inordinately long.

Could that have been related to early versions of the User Controls? I forget the exact name - that obnoxious service that prompts me every time I want to make a change, to make sure I really want to make that change. That sucker got disabled as soon as I had time to pry into it - I do like Vista, but that had to be the dumbest way to approach system security.

I hate that service. Plzz to be telling meh how to frikin disable it kk thks.

It's in the User Accounts control panel, labeled as "Turn User Account Control on or off".

Of course, every time you reboot now you'll have Vista warn you that you turned that process off. :devil

Thanks everyone.. You guys rock :D. All of this was great info and is going to help me out in my selection