Thanks for all the good info. I heard a lot of people talking about how good the Stacker was so it's good to hear that echoed. I wasn't sure about the Raptor drive, I didn't really consider it, but it's good to hear it's performing very well. I'm all for faster disk access - I'll have to see if I can scope out a good deal on one

I never really thought about a fan controller but I guess it does make a lot of sense..

The regular Raptors are more or less matched by the 1TB Hitachi and Samsung drives. The slower rotational speed on the bigger drives doesn't matter as much with the sheer data density on those platters. Raptors still win a few benchmarks, mostly seek-heavy things like big compiles, but for routine use, they offer essentially no performance advantage over the 1TBs. Worse, they're 1/8th as large, for nearly the same price.

The new 300g VelociRaptors look a lot better, but for some bizarre reason, WD didn't make them so that they'll fit in standard hotswap bays. Only buy one if you're hooking up your drive the old fashioned way, by screwing it into the case and running the cables directly to it, rather than putting it in some kind of enclosure. (I just can't believe they were that stupid; what the hell were they thinking?)

I was a little confused about whether you want big cooling or quiet performance. The Antec P182 can do both; in quiet mode, it's amazingly quiet. But low noice and high cooling are rather opposed to one another: if you configure a P182 for big airflow, which you can easily do, it's quite a lot noisier. It's NEVER horrible, but it's far from silent if you put it in wind-tunnel mode.

It's absolutely the best case I've used, and I'd suggest considering it.

Historically, SLI has been a terrible idea. It's starting to work better, but I try to always stick with fast single cards. There's just less to go wrong.

More directly answering the questions:

1. RAM speed never hurts, but you don't need RAM that's tightly coupled to the processor in the same way that you once did. If you're going quadcore, I'd go for the fastest ram you can comfortably afford. If dual core, eh, you should be fine even with 800Mhz RAM. Faster's good if you can get it cheaply. If you do plan to overclock, though, RAM is often your primary limitation on total system speed.

2. Depends on what you're doing. More CPU is never BAD, but there's a huge price delta for a small performance delta. If you don't want to overclock, low end is generally your best bang-per-buck, but your overall system speed is somewhat limited. Middle-of-the-road will usually give you very good performance for not too much money.

3. At the moment, not that much. A 32-bit program can only take 2gb anyway. If you're doing heavy multitasking, 8gb in Vista 64 can be really handy... particularly with quadcore and 8 gigs, you can run an enormous number of things at once without slowing down the machine. If your primary use is gaming, though, the extra RAM is mostly wasted, because any individual 32-bit game will never use more than 2 gigs.

4. I don't know if you're overspending on that card or not; I'm not sure how much horsepower AOC needs to run at 1920x1200. I'll have to defer to people who have actually played it. As far as future-proofed goes, who the hell knows? The rules in computing change every six months.

My personal approach has been to wait for a 'holy sh*t, that's an amazing card for not too much money!' moment, and then upgrade, and the 9800GX2 doesn't even vaguely trigger my amazing-per-dollar sensor. I'd probably just do a stock 8800GT unless I knew I needed more.

5. Dear god, yes. You could probably get along fine on a good 430W. But PCPAC makes kickass supplies, and that should last you a long, long time. Note that their 400w range supplies, as of a couple of years ago, were quite noisy -- even the Silencers. I haven't heard them lately. They're built extremely well, and will give many years of dependable service, but quiet is just not something they're very good at.

You won't find anybody around here who actually recommends SLI and I can all but guarantee you that in a year or two when you think your ready for SLI you will instead decide to scrap your current card and get a single-card upgrade. SLI has never been a good choice unless your GameGuru and have never uttered the phrase "How much does that cost?". SLI is just too far behind on the cost/benefit curve to be a worthwhile investment.

This is anothe price/performance question and depends on what you are multi-tasking. Dual/4GB/Vista will multi-take games and other normal applications just fine. If you must multi-task apps that require heavy CPU utilization (video conversion, etc.) at the same time you play games, then the quad would certainly help. Also, I personally would not consider Vista32 as an option, its 64 or XP.

The question that you need to answer is how important is cost to you? Are you are willing to pay twice as much for a computer that gives you a 10% performance increase? In two years, when the urge to upgrade again arrives, will you feel less inclined to upgrade a $2,000 rig over a $750 rig that performs almost as well?

Well don't make an exception on the video card in order to get something that lasts longer. I can see doing that with a case and even a power supply because those things don't get cheaper to make for the most part, but not with a vid card.

You can always buy a new card when the price is right and pop it into your machine. IT's an easy upgrade.

AT this point in the lifecycle I wouldn't purchase a $500ish vid card. From what I can tell, the next-gen videocards will arrive sometime this year. And usually that has meant a big performance increase. That's when I would buy a $500 vidcard. To buy now means you're going to see a lot of depreciation on your card in a short period of time.

Oh, I meant to say this, but forgot: if you do a 1GB card with a 32-bit operating system, you lose a quarter of your entire address space. 768M of VRAM will give you about 3g usable space; that's enough for a gig of programs and utilities, plus 2g for one big game. With a 1g card, that'll drop to about 2.7ish, which might be a little tight if you like to multitask much.

On the SLI front - I was pretty skeptical, and initially in AoC was a bit of a yawner. But over the last week I'd been steadilly fiddling with my settings. Last night while trying to troubleshoot the evil memory error, I turned off SLI - the drop was quite intense - almost half the frames in complex scenery. I don't know which little tweaks i did that the SLI shrugged off that the one card can't handle, but it CAN (but won't nessarily) make a big difference.

You have the 8800GTS in SLI right?

Does SLI support have to be built into games, or is it all encompassing?

Interesting.. I didn't realize SLI would tax the CPU more..

SLI isn't useless, and it does vary from game to game, but that's even beside the point. The point, at least as far as Swat's initial comments are concerned, is the price/performance boost of buying the second card some 1+ years later versus buying a better single-card solution at the same time. The former will virtually always underperform the latter, often drastically.

As I said, for SLI to make sense, it would be buying both cards right away, in order to have the added performance right away. Adding a second lesser card to the first lesser card (which is what most current cards will be a year or so from now) rarely offers the boost worth the money, compared to what that same money could buy in a brand new card. (Obviously, there can be exceptions depending on how the product cycle plays out - the 8800 GTX's unusually long reign at the top being one of those exceptions that proves the rule)

That pretty much sums it up. SLI is about getting top performance right now. It is not a winning, money-saving upgrade strategy 1-2 years later (imagine someone spending good money to try and get another 7900 GTX to SLI right now, instead of putting that money towards a new card that would blow away that SLI setup).

Basically, ths is the difference between CPU and GPU: CPU determines the maximum possible framerate you can get in the game. At 640x480, say, the framerate is generally limited by the CPU, unless you have some super-weird game with ridiculous pixel shaders or something. You can never go faster than that.

What GPU does from there is let you go to higher and higher resolutions as you add more and more power. A 6800 might only let you run 800x600 at reasonable speed, where a brand new 9800GX2 might get you up to 2560x1644 or whatever the res is on the 30" monsters. The more shaders and other tough stuff for the GPU is running, the sooner you'll run into the resolution limit of your particular card.

But even if you had an infinitely fast card, you couldn't exceed the fundamental limit of the CPU's framerate.

I'm looking at uprdading in the near future as well. So I guess my question is aren't there supposed to be P45 chipset mobos out really soon? If so wouldn't it be wise to wait for them? Also when are the new Nvidia and ATI gpu's out I had heard sometime this month.

Ok so here is my plan at the moment for a new machine. Thanks Legion for the PC build articles on your blog they are awesome. Please let me know if anyone has any advice for different parts...

CPU - Intel Q9300 Quad Core
Motherboard - Abit IP35 Pro
Graphics Card - Gigabyte 8800GT 512MB
Hard Drives: 2x750GB Samsung Spinpoint (RAID 1)
Memory - 4GB DDR2 GSkill
Power Supply - Coolermaster 500W
Case - Coolermaster RC690

I'm trying to keep it somewhere around a thousand. The total right now before tax and shipping is $1067.92 and there are $60 in mail in rebates.

I would consider switching the motherboard to the less expensive Gigabyte board that I use in my $750 articles, unless there's a specific reason that you want the Abit board. The Abit's got some very nice extra features, and I used it in the $1500 build article I wrote, but unless you plan to use dual LAN ports or do some boundary-pushing overclocking to where you'd want the POST lights and external CMOS reset switch, there's probably little reason to spend $180 for the Abit when $90 for the Gigabyte gets you a rock-solid board.

Updated my post based on some recommendations. Dropping SLI for now, like you guys said, doesn't make sense unless you go SLI out of the gates, and that's just overkill at this point.

+ ASUS PK5-E P35
+ GSkill F2-8000CL5D PC2-8000 4GB 2x2GB DDR2-1000 CL5-5-5-15
+ Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB

From the gear I have listed now, I hope it can provide ample room to overclock without going too crazy. The Velociraptor seems a bit pricey, but I remember the days of paying well over $300 for a drive, so it's not that it's overly expensive, it's just that it seems the other drives have become ridiculously cheap (How's that for justification? Haha.. oh boy)

Edit: Still not sure about Vista. Is there any point yet other than utilizing more than 3GB RAM and DX10? I'd rather stick with my Windows XP for now instead of dropping the cash unless there's a good reason to do so..