Build me the best 1000$ (canadian) gaming rig

[ellyo414]

Its that time of the year for me to build a new gaming rig. My budget is 1000$ before shipping/tax. Mouse, keyboard and monitor are already supplied. I plan on buying everything by next sunday. I am open to either AMD or Intel for the processor and ATI or NVIDIA for the videocard. Can't use that template they have stickied for new computers because im posting this from an ipod, sorry. Thanks.

 

[geofelt]

Its that time of the year for me to build a new gaming rig. My budget is 1000$ before shipping/tax. Mouse, keyboard and monitor are already supplied. I plan on buying everything by next sunday. I am open to either AMD or Intel for the processor and ATI or NVIDIA for the videocard. Can't use that template they have stickied for new computers because im posting this from an ipod, sorry. Thanks.

Start with the vga card. Get the best one you feel comfortable buying. That should be something like a GTX275 or 4890.

Look for a cpu clocked at 3.0 . At a clock rate of 3.0 or better, the vga card is much more important for gaming than the cpu.
At that level, overclocking is good for bragging, but it will not net you as much increase
in FPS as a better vga card will. Today, very few games can make use of more than two cores.
Flight simulator X and supreme commander are exceptions. It is not a trivial matter to code multi threaded programs,
and game vendors will not sell too many games that require quads to run.
I don't see this changing in the next couple of years.

Net: Something like a E8500 for the increased clock speed.

Look for a P45 motherboard from Asus or gigabyte.

For any ram you are considering, do your own homework.
Go to the ram vendor's web site, and access their configurator.
Corsair, Kingston, Patriot, OCZ and others have them.
Their compatibility list is more current than the motherboard vendor's QVL lists which rarely get updated.
Enter your mobo or PC, and get a list of compatible ram sticks.

Cpu performance is not very sensitive to ram speeds.
If you look at real application and game benchmarks(vs. synthetic tests),
you will see negligible difference in performance between the slowest and fastest ram.
Perhaps 1-2%. Not worth it to me.
Don't pay extra for faster ram or better timings unless you are a maximum overclocker.
4gb in a 2x2gb configuration is right for most.

Get a quality psu in the 600 watt range. Good units come from PC P&C, Corsair, Seasonic, and Antec, to name a few.

Consider windows-7 release candidate in the 64 bit version. Plan on a re-install of the official version in the fall. If a full re-install then is uncomfortable, then Vista home premium 64 bit is very good. Are you a student? If so, look into an academic license.



A case is personal preference; they all work.

---good luck---