New PC: What, Where, How Much?

[Thee_oddball]

Originally Posted by etzi

Take the i7-2600K or the i5-2500K CPU. There is actual no way arround.

Asus P8P67 Board.

8 GB of Ram are enough.

And a video card of your choice.

Currently you can not say on which card CoD performs better (Nvidia or Ati).

I have a i5-2500K @ 4.9 GHz and a 6950 @ 6970.

I have enough frames. It´s all about the stuttering...

i5-2500K, Asus P8P67, 8 GB Ram, 6950 2Gb, SSD 120GB --> $ 1000

ASUS, the worldwide leader in motherboard design and sales, today announced the release of the industry's first AM3+ CPU enabled motherboard solution based on the existing AMD 8-Series Chipsets. Current owners of an AM3-based board* will make their AMD 8-Series motherboards compatible with the latest AM3+ CPUs with a simple BIOS** update from the official ASUS website

so he should be able to drop a bulldozer chip right in

[Armatian]

To wait until bull cames out will be wise, i'll not jump right in thoug, early adoption is not a nice way to build your first pc, there's always some tame to do on new architecture, but you can buy the now "obsolete" tech at much lower prices.

No matter how much you spend, in a year the tide will change, with that amount, you can build a seriously fast system right now, and make another step next year.

There's no point on spending 100 bucks for maybe a 15-20% improvement, that amounts to around 7fps.

For what i understand, having to sweat for those dollars, i'll do a two step rig.

Go for a good quad, with stock cooling and speeds, good amount of quality ram (don't bother on high performance kits, it does nothing for real world performance) and vga's like nvidia 560-570, or ati 6950.

Be generous with the psu, 650+ top quality, it will last years and will save you lots of headaches, bad energy supply can give you surprises like higher temps on your vga, bad 3d performance and even unstability.

PD:Custom vgas with slightly higer clocks and better than stock cooling doesn't hurt.

[OldBuzzard]

Fangio,

If you are looking for a pre-built system, then you might want to take a GOOD look at MAINGEAR:
http://www.maingear.com/index.php

They have an excellent reputation, and are quite 'reasonable' for being a high end boutique builder.

They used to offer AMD based systems, but it looks like now all they offer are Intel based ones. That's not all bad, but I am a confirmed AMD fan boy and it pains me to see folks like Maingear ignoring AMD.

OH, and don't worry about what some folks are saying about that little fracas sometime back. You and I both know that the history books have it wrong, and that it was really "The War of Northern Aggression".