Need Decent $1000 Build, Need Help

[Inferno106]

I have been looking around the forums for a while waiting for the price drops on Intel chips and gathering advice and information, but, ultimately, I figured I would just come right out and ask, so here goes:

So, I am a poor college student but I am also an avid PC gamer (two things that do not go hand-in-hand nicely). My current (old) system is a P4 3.2Ghz, 1Gb RAM, and a GeForce 7800GTS - so obviously it needs a lot of upgrading.

My overall budget limit is $1000 however a hundred or so over should be okay because I have a few parts from other computers that I can ebay to recoup some expenses.

Overall, I would like a system that is able to play games like Crysis and Bioshock at decent framerates while still looking good (if this is possible with such a limited budget).

What I have in mind so far:

Core 2 Duo E6850 (Are the quad cores worth it now since the price drop?)
GeForce 8800GTS 320Mb
2Gbs of RAM (anybody know of any good RAM that would fit)
Power Supply
Motheboard
Hard Drive

- Not a lot to work with, I know, sorry. It has been a while since I upgraded so I am not the most knowledgable person when it comes to individual parts.

It gets complicated though, I have a case that is OKAY but it tends to run a little hot sometimes so, I can keep it if I need to save money. Additionally, I already have a 250Gb external hardrive for data storage so I only need a "relatively" small SATA one for OS and programs (maybe like 150gb or so). I also have all the peripherals such as keyboard, mouse, monitor, and I also have a DVD drive, sound card, and network card so I don't need any of those.

I do not necessarily plan to overclock anything - this is mostly because I don't really know how to, but if anyone thinks it is a good idea I will seriously consider it. Also, I do not play games at ridiculous resolutions so a video card that can run full blast at maxed out resolutions is really not that important.

So, basically, I need advice on everything. Thank's a lot in advance everyone.

 

[Dior]

$1000 is plenty if you spend it wisely. E6850 is a great CPU but there's no reason to loose extra 2 cores for the same price, especially considering that the future games will fully support 4 cores (Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3).

Centurion 5 case $50
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119077
Q6600 $273 (mwave.com)
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R $130
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128050
2GB Patriot DDR2800 $74
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220144
Corsair 520HX $99 (buy.com)
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro $22 (directron.com)
Seagate 250GB $70
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822148262
EVGA 8800 640MB $350
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130071

Total: $1068 after $75 rebate.

Not everything is from newegg, unfortunately they don't have the best prices for everything, the reason I picked 640MB version of 8800 GTS is because 320MB just won't cut it for future games. The cheap cooler should be enough to do a slight overclock from 2.4Ghz to probably around 2.8Ghz, at that stage it will perform almost identically to E6850 but have an extra 2 cores!

That's about as good as it gets for that money in my opinion.
Good luck.

 

[Inferno106]

Thank's for the help. One of the biggest complaints I have noticed with that video card is that it is not necessarily designed for Vista or Dx10. I plan on upgrading to Vista as soon as SP1 comes out, is this basically a driver issue? It seems like this is a problem with many of the 8800 series cards - GTS OR GTX. Is this the case?

 

[emp]

There's no problem with the 8800GTS with Vista 64-bit Ultimate,
I can vouch for that, and nobody can REALLY say anything about DX10 until true DX10 titles hit the shelves (Since all we had so far are patched DX10 titles), Crysis will be the judge of DX10 I believe . While benchmarking GRAW2 and CoH with the newest beta drivers for the GF8 I did notice that both games were performing equally under XP SP2 and Vista 64. So I'm sticking with Vista now If you do get vista, remember to get the 64-Bit version (Regardless of edition) and to get the latest beta drivers from nvidia (I think they are ForceWare 162.22).

About the build, go with what Dior said, maybe a smaller HDD if you don't need the whole 250GB (I'd get the 250GB though, games are weighing in at 5-8GB a pop each)

 

[Inferno106]

Thanks a lot, I appreciate all the help