I was talked into building my own pc. I have been talking to a few people to get multipule answers and to hear what everyone says. John, i'd like to hear you opinion on what this guy says and this set up he came up with.

"And a single powerful card is always going to destroy to lower powered cards, especially 8500GTs. You should be looking at a HD 3870/8800GT(s). And if you're just gaming then a Quad is pointless, you'd be better off going for a higher clocked dual core which will give better performance for games. Most engines just aren't optimized for quads yet and peform better with higher clocked dual cores.
You are never going to be able to run games at max settings with two 8500GTs."




CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115047
This is one of Intel's new 45nm Wolfdale processors, this will give better gaming performance than the Q6600 because of the higher clock speeds. It is also more power efficient and runs cooler.

CPU cooler: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103031
Since the CPU is the OEM version, you will need a cooler, this will do fine and will be a lot quieter than the stock cooler.

Motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128059
P35 chipset is what you need, and this is a great board for the price.

Memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227267
You said you wanted 4GB, so here is some of the best for a great price too. CAS 4 timings will improve performance a bit too.

PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817341010
The OCZ power supplys are manufactured by the FSP Group so you know you are getting a reliable solid PSU.

OS: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832116204
As you want 4GB of RAM, you will need a 64 bit OS, for all the memory to be addressed (32 bit OS's cannot address more than 3GB of RAM)

Case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811233002
I've read some very favourable review about this case and it's a full tower, made from alumimium, and it looks great.

Disk drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827129009
You can't really go wrong here, but having a nice SATA interface with it's tidy thin cable is a plus.

GPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127325
This will absolutely destroy two 8500GTs. It is a full G92 with all the 128 stream processors. Great price too.

I didn't add a hard drive as I didn't know how much space you'd need.

All that comes to $950 not including the $70 worth of rebates. So that's $880 and it will outperform the prebuilt by a fair margin, especially in games.

I see what he says, but for system expandability and to prevent being left out in the cold is games go the way of using quad cores more efficiently, I'd go with the Quad core. Being able to OC the Quad Core is a plus, as it can be pretty easily OCd with decent cooling, power supply, and motherboard and RAM. All of those listed in that post are of good quality.

About the dual SLI of 8500s vs a single 8800 - he's dead right.

I cant tell you the difference between duo core and quad core, but so your saying that I should do with everything that he mentioned except exchange out the processor with a quad core?

He is a quad core processor that I found...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115043

Is it any good, or do you recommend something else, also will it work with all the other items purchased?

As long as the other components that you purchase are compatible with that processor (I assume the motherboard is because of the original processor suggested, however, it is possible that it may not, so you had best check and double check).

Ok, stupid question coming... How do I know if they are all compatible?

you'll have to read the specifications of each piece - the CPU, the motherboard (which is the critical one - either it can or it cannot handle the CPU), and the memory.

The other components will primarily need to be compatible with the motherboard.

But the OS itself does not properly address 4 GB of RAM, no matter how you slice it.

Even Vista, pre-SP1, would only report 3 GB RAM. Vista SP1 supposedly fixes the total reported, but as I understand it, does not *fully* address the 4 GB it can get - and even then, you are stuck without the chance to upgrade, and why do that to yourself in the first place?

The total price on this system seems better than I would have expected - I might just be returning my HP and building this one....

Oh, and as for the links not being viewable - you copied the post directly from the other source where you got the information - and that board has a system to shorten very long URLs by inserting an ellipse in the middle of the URL - but when you copied the post it copied the ellipses, not the actual *whole* URL - so that is why none of the URLs work. I'll go back to the other site, grab the post, fix the URLs, so every one here can view the items.

I just added all the items there listed, including a $5.99 charge for arctic silver (thermal compound) and it comes to $1039.91 before rebates.

John, since you think I should go with a quad core... I just found this and was wondering what you think of it? Also, I think it will work with all the other items listed above...?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115017

The first one you listed is the new Quad that is more heat efficient - and if you are not going to significantly overclock the machine, that will be sufficient - however, I would not buy either of those, look for the OEM versions of either CPU as the list you have from the other site includes an after market CPU Cooler, and those are much more efficient at dissipating heat than the stock coolers that come with brand new CPUs - and OEMs are usually $10-30 cheaper.

Also, for reference, I bought this cooler instead of the one suggest - it is applicable to Socket 478 (my now dead machine), AMD and Socket 775: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835154002