Build me a system

[snidy]

I want to build a high end gaming system, can I get some oppinions and advice for the greatest system, I have $3000.00 to spend, and already have a monitor.

 

[evilroot]

With that kind of budget, you can have a seriously badass system,

I'd recommend something along the lines of:

Athlon XP 2800+
nForce2 mobo with dual-channel DDR support
2 sticks of PC3200 512mb CL2 DDR
Radeon 9700 Pro video card
Dual 120gig WD Special Edition 8mb drives (I'm partial to that drive)
48x24x48 CDRW
430w Enermax dual fan PSU


You could also go all U160 SCSI, but that's probably not worth the extra cost. With the specs above, if I were building the machine for someone I'd probably charge about $2300 or so.

 

[dejacky]

I'd got with Antec TruPower series power supplies instead of enermax. By the way $3000 for a high end system is OVERKILL. I would rather use a SCSI hard disk system (preferably mobo has scsi) and raid0 2 of the fastes 15K drives from Seagate (15K.3 something like that it's called). These are also very quiet drives and very fast. I would make all optical drives scsi also...these systems perform more smoothly than their IDE counterparts and offer more throughput along with less latency. Again, this can probably be done with $1500. $3000 is wasted money unless you want something like an optical hard drive which delivers Terrabytes of throuput. But if this is just used for gaming, that would also be overkill since games don't utilize that much bandwidth yet. I hope this helped you.

-dejacky

 

[xSauronx]

also considering the 3 grand you spend now will be worth half that in 6 months....theres another thread where someone wanted a dream machine around here, havent looked at it, but likely worth a read

nice box you have already tho, gonna sell it or what?

 

[snidy]

I'm not necesarly going to spend $3000.00, that's just as high as I can go.
Should I wait for the new Nvidia FX video card?
My old system is for my son, I want to network them together.

 

[ai42]

If you want the true dream machine I would wait just a bit longer. If hammer cracks up to be what everybody is saying it will be...

Also I think you should consider the P4 platform as it is a very strong right now I am much more inclined to go for a P4 right now over a AthlonXP.

If your going to drop that kind of cash....
Sony 4x DVD-R DVD-RW DVD+R DVD+RW Drive
GeForceFX (its not that far off last couple weeks of the year/early January release)
Serial ATA maybe... will be here by next year (they keep pushing them back!!), as SCSI is really expensive for what you get, and SATA includes a lot of SCSI features, and upper end IDE cost.

 

[dejacky]

Actually,
every AthlonXP system i've tried seems to exhibit snappier performance compared to every P4 system i've used. This is especially true with audio editing and has been proven with Cakewalk Sonar. Basically, the p4's will use considerably more cpu cycles to do a task that the athlonxp can do in much less cycles (<25% difference). Go to www.prorec.com if you want to find the post in the discussion forums.

-dejacky