My Proposed Gaming Build

Looks top of the line. Do you plan to run dual cards down the road? What games do you play?

I would like to run dual cards eventually, I have looked around at alot of benchmarks and what not, crossfire 6950s are pretty good for the price. Havent really picked out any games to play yet haha. Most likely I would like to try crysis 2 when it comes out, ESV, dragon age 2 (played 1 on the ps3, friend said it was 10x better on computer + mods), maybe an MMO.

Would there be a big difference if I dropped the memory from 12 to 6GB?

if you're just gaming and watching HD movies, 6gb will be plenty.

PC will be ahead of game consoles in terms of technologies. We can always upgrade our gaming rigs. Game console lifecycle is like 5 years. Now the big players say it's 10 years. That's worse. By then we may be able to jack into the matrix, so to speak. FWIW, I used to be a game console player.

Back on topic, do you mean The Elder Scrolls V? I watched the trailer. The game is sick. Couldn't tell if it was a movie or game. If IV is any indication, IV will be gpu-intensive. You may need 2 cards to run it at 60 fps at max image quality & resolution.

Crisis 2 will be out in 2 months. I wouldn't expect to run it very well without a top-of-the-line gpu.

Not a lot of difference between 12 gigs & 6 gigs unless you do VMWare or some big apps. LGA1366 runs triple channel. So 2X3 gigs would be a good match. FYI, the platform won't get any new cpus less than $1000. It'll be replaced by LGA2011 which runs quad channel memory.

http://vr-zone.com/articles/exclusive-intel-s-first-lga...

Do you plan to overclock? The specs look great so far.

Yea I am a console gamer right now. How did you like going from console to PC? Yea Elder Scrolls V looks great! I will probably get a second video card by then. I think I am going to change out the radeon 6950 for the GTX570. It seems the 570 on most performance tests runs pretty nicely, plus the physx engine looks nice for games like ESV. I am still waiting on a paycheck so its all up in the air at this moment.

A pair of 6950's usually outperform a pair of 570's. They're cheaper and also draw less power.

With console gaming, it was mostly checking out forums for news, browsing ign & gamespot for game reviews, renting a good game over & over until I beat it, and buying keeper games at game stores. I never had to get down to the nitty gritty of the hardware. Everything was factory-built. Really plug n play. I spent more time & money on the software than the hardware.

With pc gaming, it's a bit like console gaming in reverse. The genres are different: fps, tps (most likely influenced by console gaming), rts, sims, etc. I spend more time & money on hardware than software. Need to know if I'm spending my money wisely by reading hardware reviews & benchmarks. My games run faster on GeForce so that's my choice. Also, I run Linux once in a while. ATi driver support for Linux is still lagging behind GeForce, but it's getting better. At least, you can download a driver & click to install, instead of punching in command lines. Also, a PC runs more than just a game. The OS, drivers, services, security software like anti-virus, etc. These things either are non-existent or transparent to the console gamer.

In the end, it's really worth it to go pc gaming cuz I can customize the image quality to suit my video card. In game consoles, the most you can do is change resolutions & outputs. I can now set depth of view to maximum, among a dozen other IQ settings. Take GTA4 for example. It's light years ahead on the pc. My sandybridge gaming rig still can't max out GTA4. I know it's bad code, but still. The EFLC expansions cut down the load time to like seconds. I'm not even running a SSD.

BTW, nvidia is rolling out a GTX590 soon. Ati a HD6990. Maybe wait for reviews & benchmarks.