New Gaming Rig Advice

[Pez D Spencer]

Hey what's up. I plan on building a new gaming rig soon and need some advice. I hate to start another one of these threads but like the topic summary says, I've been out of the loop for about 10 or so months.

Last year I built a rig with an ASUS A8N-32 SLI board, Operon 170, 2GB Corsair XMS, and dual 7900GT's. It was a decent setup but this past spring I got heavily into motorcycles and sold the PC so I could build a chopper. Well, the chopper is done and now I'm looking to build another gaming setup.

I plan on building this computer somewhere around March. I'll have about 2500 to spend. Are there any new boards, CPU's, or GPU's I should be looking for? What's on the horizon? I guess I should also add that I'm into overclocking. After owning that Opteron I'm kind of partial to AMD now but it looks like a lot of people are talking Intel these days.

Any advice is appriciated. Thanks.

 

[Commodus]

By March, you'll probably need to consider ATI's R600 (could become the Radeon X2K series). It may not automatically become a better choice, but it's on the short list.

You'll almost certainly be looking at an Intel-based system. The quad-core Core 2 chips may be out of your league at the time ($850+ for something which may be slower in some games? No thanks). You'll probably not have to worry about upcoming mainboards since the nForce 600-series should do the trick (for SLI, anyways). I just got a Core 2 Duo system of my own using an Intel-based mainboard (Asus' P5B-E) and it's performing beautifully.

 

[themisfit610]

Right. Core 2 Duo is all the rage right now for just about everyone - gamers, overclockers, video encoders, it's pretty much the way to go as long as you can spend at least $200 on a processor. I've ALWAYS been an AMD fan since the original Athlon days, but this really makes AMD look bad.

Video cards - the GeForce 8 is absolutely amazing, but the early benchmarks for the soon to come R600 series look significantly better. I would hold off buying anything until the new ATI cards come out - at the very least it will drive prices on the GeForce 8 down a bit - they have been falling steadily as is.

Something really important that a of people neglect is the importance if the human interface. IE a really good monitor and sound system. A 24" Widescreen with SLI video cards backing it up and a Logitech 500W 5.1 system is really the way to go!

What about storage? Do you just play games or do you also tend to collect media?

Here's a sample setup:
Antec P180 case - 120
Antec 650w PSU - 3 19A 12V rails! - 125
Gigabyte DQ6 p965 motherboard - $195
Core 2 Duo E6600 (4MB L2) - $310
2GB OCZ Platinum DDR2 800 CAS4 - $240
8800GTS - $410
Acer 24" Widescreen 1920x1200 LCD - $640
Seagate 500GB SATA $140
NEC Black DVDRW - $40

Gets you up to ~$2420 with taxes and shipping. A little extra room to add keyboard / mouse or maybe some speakers if you trim some fat and can add $100 or so to the budget

You should be able to overclock a bit, and that 8800gts should be able to handle most games at 1920x1200...

 

[Howard]

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 - $185
ASUS P5B - $127
Buffalo Firestix 2x1GB DDR2-800 - $243
PNY 8800GTS - $410, $20 MIR
WD WD740ADFD 74GB SATA - $150
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA - $95
Antec P180B - $125, $25 MIR
Shipping from newegg.com - ~$30

Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic - $70 + $? shipping

Corsair CMPSU-520HX - $115, free shipping

Logitech MX518 - $35 + ~$6 shipping

Thermalright Ultra-120 - $40
Yate Loon D12SL-12 - $3.50
Shipping from jab-tech.com - $?

CS Hyde C4-NGen Large mouse pad - $15 + $? shipping

Total including shipping - ~$1650

Monitor and speakers are up to others to decide. Why the MX518?

You'll need to mod the D12SL-12 fan a bit. Here's how.