New Gaming Rig

[Rebasxer]

I haven't been following hardware for the last year or so and its time to build a new rig. I don't need a monitor and I have an extra copy of xp lying around so all I need is the hardware. The rig will be used mainly for gaming, I'm familiar with water cooling so I'd like put that in too. The budget is 2000$

 

[hennethannun]

hmm, if it is for gaming, I would suggest something like this:

E6600 ($350)
Nforce 590 or 975X motherboard (about $250) depending on your GPU preference
2x1GB DDR2 800 (you could go higher, but i don't think you will NEED it, but if you have extra money to burn, then go for faster mem, corsair, crucial, OCZ platinum would all be fine) (about $250)
whatever hard drives you want (say $200 for a basic RAID setup or a raptor system drive and a bigger storage drive)
Optical drive (about $30)
2x 7900 GT[X if you can afford it] or 2x1900 XT (one crossfire edition) ($750)
Case and PSU ($250). personally, I personally like aluminum full towers like the thermaltake armor, but I also stick with air cooling, so make sure whatever you go with will fit your water system.

all together, that is about $2050, but my estimates are also a bit on the high side. you would have to provide your own mouse, keyboard and monitor. You could also save a ton of money by sticking to a single videocard solution. but you really want the best gaming experience, dual-card does over much better performance (just not much value IMO). Also, you could stick with a single hard drive for now, and save a bunch more.

all in all, $2000 is more than enough for a very high end system, much more system than most people really need. so decide if you want to spend all the way up to your budget, or if you would rather sacrifice a bit of performance for a bit more cash in your pocket...

 

[akshayt]

Radeon X1900XT

Asus P5W/DFi counterpart overclocker which is much cheaper

4 X 1GB DDR2 800 Value RAM

300GB SATA II NCQ HDD

600watts or higher quality PSU like OCZ, Forton, Seasonic etc

Core 2 Duo E6600 or E6400 is budget doesn't permit

Air cooler + water cooling if you can afford it

Cabinet maybe in 50-100$

DVD RW + Combo + FDD

CPU: E6600. Fine if you can afford it.

MB: I would say get P5W for its oc

GPU:Confirm whether P5W has probs or not with 1900 as P5B has, I would rather get a 1900XT over a 7900GTX OC and if you want to go higher I would rather get X1950XTX. If you still want to go higher you can choose between Nvidia and ATi but ATI should be a better deal as it has better IQ, HDR + AA, more powerful card at least individually

RAM: I feel that you should get 4GB as very soon games will be optimized to use it and 4GB will be more than enough for running any game just fine with no hassels of coming to the forum for knowing the cause of stuttering or choppiness etc. 4GB will also be required for making better use of Vista and to make it far smoother especially while mutlitasking. You can take value ram instead of xms or perforamnce ram though.

Get DVD RW + combo at least

 

[vorgusa]

Also matters what games you are playing.. you might be going overboard with an SLI or crossfire system and could toss that money into Hard drives to work in raid or if you want to go all out a Raid card to do a better job then an integrated Raid

 

[hennethannun]

mmm, I got the impression that the OP already HAD a watercooling system, but upon reading his post again, I may have been wrong.

In that case, you might want to think about getting a 975X motherboard and an x1900 crossfire edition.

That will leave you with enough money to get a watercooling sytem with enough left over to get a better hdd set up for RAID, or maybe even more memory (if you really want 4GB). And you will always be able to get another x1900 gpu down the road and go crossfire if you find that you really want to game at higher resolutions.