Taking the plunge, please advise me.

Ok, I really, really need help. I am building a new pc and am overwhelmed about all the information out there. Here is what I planned on so far:

Q6600 Quad Core
Asus P5QL-E or Gigabyte EP43-DS3L (??)
3 gig of DDR2 Ram

Ok..so far what do you think? Now I am also open for suggestions on the previous components and the following:

Video Card. Was thinking 8800GT or 9600GT
What about my power supply? Would 750W be enough?

I already have hard drives that I want to put in. A combo of 1 IDE and 1 SATA drive. I already have a case too. Also, what about my CPU fan? Should I go with an 3rd party one?

I have a budget of about $800 +/-. I plan on just going to a mom and pop store locally here, yes, I know there are cheap websites, but I like brick and mortar, in my hand type of stores.

Thanks for ANY help you can give me. I plan on buying within the next couple days.

FYI, I want it mostly to be able to game. I don't need the highest frame rates out there, just want to play the latest games and have them look great. I have a P IV 3.0 GHZ right now with an AGP 6600 card, so I have been out of gaming for a long time.

I agree with Megamanx00 ... get 4 gigs of ram, two 2 gig sticks.

Get a Duo. The E8400 is all the rave right now for its price/performance/overclockablilty. Duos are better for gaming and excel in many other scenarios because they come with higher clock rates. You only see increased performance on quads when you're using all more than two cores and unless you're doing a lot of video editing you probably won't use them. +1 on the 4GB of ram. Go with 800 MHz ram as 1066 MHz ram's performance increase isn't worth the price. 750W is more than enough for your PSU but make sure it's a quality one. I have a Corsair TX750 but there are many other good brands. If you want to play the latest games I would get a better video card. I picked up a GTX 260 OC for only $200 here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 814127361. I don't think you can beat this. This card performs almost as well as a GTX 280 and runs very cool. You can save a LOT of money by ordering everything online yourself.

i'm in the same boat guys. i, too, have fancied myself a computer person but am just now taking on the task of building my own rig. it'll be primarily for gaming as i have a laptop that is no longer cutting it. anyway, i have a budget of ~1000USD and have a few questions.

first I want to make this build last ~2 years w/o switching out the bulk of the components. that being said, I'm not against buying a second GPU for crossfire down the line or expanding RAM, etc. I know the new core i7's are coming out and i wanna hold out as long as i can and i do know i'll need to get a new mobo w/ those cuz they don't use FSB like the current gen.

i picked out a case and a 650W psu along with the new OC Palit 4850 Sonic. i was also thinking about some g.Skill PC-6400 ram (only ~70usd for 2x2GB) I'm specifically looking at the P5K DELUXE/WIFI-AP Intel Motherboard at the moment. also, trying to decide about E8400 vs Q6600. i dunno how much overclocking i'll be able to do... i'm a total newb at this stuff; i've never done it before.

along with all that... i was wondering is it worth buying a mobo with 2 PCIe 2.0 16x slots for crossfire two 4850s in a year? Should I even worry about ddr3 if i know I'm going to buy a new mobo for a Nehalem in ~2 years?

yeah... questions abound. thanks in advance.

Is it worth investing a crossfire/SLI board? would 650W be able to handle two 4850s?

The benefits of using SLI are mostly seen when running the latest games at ultra high resolutions with anti-aliasing and ansitropic filtering turned on. In some scenarios you can almost see a 2x increase in FPS which is pretty good in my opinion. Look at these benchmarks. This is Crysis at 1920x1200 at maxmimum settings.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] 1,752.html
Fraps/Contact (1920x1200, 0xAA, Trilinear, Very High Quality)

With one GTX 260 you're only going to get about 12.6 FPS but with two of them you'll get 21.6 (more if they're OCed). So there are times when SLI works really well. But most games today will run perfectly well at maximum settings with just one GTX 260. I think more games will take advantage of SLI in the future, and so I would recommend getting an SLI board just in case you ever want to upgrade your graphics processing power. If you don't get an SLI board now, then you may regret it later. Just ask yourself if you think the extra $50-80 for a motherboard is worth the ability to upgrade in the future. A 650W PSU should be fine but I would go with 750W just to be safe.

2nd option