Good time for a new System?

The GTX 660 should come out soon ( have to see how that matches up to a 7850 )

If you like AMD you can wait for the new CPUs

Whats your budget and what stuff do you need ?

I honestly don't think the new AMD CPUs are going to be waiting for if they're going to continue to use AM3. If they use a new socket (AM4, something else) then it might be interesting to see. But I'd stick with Intel in the CPU department.

Well it's going to be a high end gaming rig mostly with some media server stuff. I'd like to keep it under 3k, not a huge fan of AMD, and I need everything except my dual monitors, mouse, keyboard, and speakers. Will be bringing over two TB HD's that have my media files. Also curious about if liquid cooling is worth it yet, always seemed like an interesting option but I'm not sure if it's matured enough yet.

with that budget i would suspect you would be looking at the higher end graphic cards and those are out. right now the best bang for your buck is the GTX 670 ($400). the next intel platform change (cpu, motherboard) will be late next year with the release of haswell; ivy bridge has been out for awhile now and everything except the i3-3xxx are for sale.
i don't know what you mean by water cooling yet to mature, a inexpensive $125 corsair H100 looks like a decent self contained system with little worry for the common user.
even SSDs have come along to where i would have no apprehension in picking an inexpensive one for my OS, applications and games.
so AFAIK, everything that is "new" is out so no sense in waiting.

I don't really understand these two company's cycles.

For a higher end system, like looniam and g-unit1111 said Intel would be the way to go with a GTX 670

You said water cooled ? so your into OCing ? How about sli/crossfire ?

Some parts to look into

Z77 MoBos With 1 or 2 PCI E 3.0 also you might like a MoBo with 4X SATA 6GB ( Something like this ) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

i5 3570 K

GTX 670

240 GB SSD

750W PSU < if your going to sli down the road

Thanks alot of good info here, I have thought about SLI and have used it in the past. However I've read articles about how most games aren't tuned enough to get full benefit anyway. Also I've been burned with my last SLI where one card died and unfortunately was out of production so I couldn't replace it. I think this time around I'll stick with the single card high end card. The water cooling is to keep the machine running quiter and some OCing.

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