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ex-gamer looking to build a new rig

Balforth

Balforth

Member
Used to game a lot, but I've since gotten married and had kids. I'm still using my P4C 3.0ghz procsessor with hyperthreading technology that I bought when they FIRST came out, ASUS P4C-800 mobo, and ATI 9600 video card.

I have a son who likes to play games, and I'm about to buy an HD camcorder that records video to a hard drive in AVHCD format, which apparently people say requries a computer with a lot horsepower to transfer/edit videos. I'm also completely captivated by some of the triple monitor set-ups that I've seen, so I might just be really stupid and try to do it.

I'm completely out of the loop on the state of computing technology, but was thrilled to see that I can buy a top-of-the-line AMD quad core for $245. So I think that building a pretty beefy system shouldn't be much of a problem... it looks like the biggest expense will be video card(s)?

Can somebody give me a general direction? I mean, are people building dual processor, quad core systems? Is putting 16gb of ram into a system ridiculous? Is dual video cards in an SLi bridge still the cool thing to do, or are you better off buying one kick-ass video card? Any other general recommendations for building a screaming system?

Thanks in advance
 
So you want to build a rig mainly to encode video & light gaming? What will it be primarily used for?

EDIT: what is your financial limitations with this build?
 
PRIMARY usage is general computing -- email, occasional word processing. I have a son who plays all kinds of games... so i would say occasional gaming, and I imagine that we will be transferring lots of high def video to the computer and wanting to edit/splice/etc. I have a daughter who loves to make little music video/slideshows. So I imagine once we get the new camera she's going to go nuts. We're moving to Germany so I imagine we'll be wanting to put things together to share with family/friends back home. I'll also probably want to end up burning the videos to blu ray.

I'd be willing to upgrade incrementally if I have to spend more to to keep the budget from exploding all at once... But in general I'd be willing to spend $1500-$2000 on processor/mobo/ram/hd/video/case+power+cooling/blu ray burner.
 
An i7 Rig will cost betwen 5-600$ just for the CPU, RAM, & Mobo.
A 775 LGA C2Q @ 400$ for CPU RAM & Mobo
Not sure on an AMD system.

The i7 will be the best at doing the video editing. The rest are about equal in the Quad scene like games, burning movies, etc.

MicroCenter is selling D0 (new stepping i7's) from what I've heard; and at 199$ But you might want to make sure and ask first. I'm not sure on the batch numbers that indicate a D0 - Generally the D0's will overclock higher with less voltage.

Before I go any further, where will you be buying from? and read this 🙂
 
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