Way..way...way..overkill right now. It will be 12 to 18 months before any games will need anything close to that kind of horsepower.

You could save yourself some money buy going with a dual or quad chip.

As far as your question goes, have you looked at Dell's Outlet store?? They have open box specials, you probably could find a good monitor there. Not sure why you need 2ms response time. I have a Dell 24" LCD monitor that is 5 years old, and still going strong. I play a lot of FPS, and have never noticed any ghosting, or anything bad with the monitor.

well, i hope it is overkill, i dont want to have to purchase or upgrade the computer for 3 or 4 years, but i figure that if i go i7 then i wouldnt have to upgrade the mobo, and i could always add ram.

Im not sure if i would want to get an open box monitor, i would be afraid of dead pixels and what not.

also i would reccomend ditching the 4870 1gb and get a 4850x2 card.

get a 4850x2

1)
Ram is good enough. Ram speed has little real world impact. As long as there is enough of it to avoid using page file off hdd, you're good. 6gb is enough.
2)
There are retention brackets/bolt through kits that adapts existing lga 775 coolers to lga1366. Current native lga1366 coolers out so far are crap, don't get them.
http://i4memory.com/wp/article/309
http://www.coolcomputing.com/article.php?sid=2402
http://www.frostytech.com/top5heatsinks.cfm
3)
Motherboard is good enough. X58 are very expensive right now. It's the only one below $300. I've never used it, of course, but specs look solid.
4)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6824112011

Single 4870 is seriously weak for a $2k gaming rig. Get 4870x2, or at least 9800gx2.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3341&p=13
http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3341&p=14
http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3341&p=15
http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3341&p=16
http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3341&p=17
http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3341&p=18
http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3341&p=19
Graphics card is the single most important determinant of gaming performance. Sacrifice anything and everything else in the system to keep it strong. That includes the motherboard and cpu. Frankly, with your single gpu setup, i7 don't handle well compared to current quads anyway.


http://techgage.com/article/intel_ [...] preview/11
If you don't run multiple gpu, you're not getting the benefit of i7 in gaming.

Another thing is psu. 650w is small for a $2k system. Get a beefier one. It's a pain to change out later. With x58 able to run both cf and sli, you want to keep dual/quad gpu upgrading options open by using a psu that can keep up.

Yes, by a lot. See benchmarks. If you have the cash, get 4870x2. At the very least, get 9800gx2. It's $275 on Newegg, so there is no excuse getting that 4870 and letting a $2k system go to waste.

For the heat sink, I'd go with the "Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme 1366 RT" if you want to stick with air cooling. They should be releasing soon. The heat sink is out now, but the combo with the retention bracket for 1366, and the fan mount is not yet available to my knowledge.

Yes. Although you might want to consider getting an x2 card instead of 2 cards to leave room for quad cf/sli later.

yeah, but i could get 2 4850s for around 280, and they would both be oced already, i think it would cost around 380, and if i ever did crossfire 2 4850x2s then im sure i would have to get a bigger psu than 750