New Build (Planetside 2 / BF3 / Productivity)

Fair point - I suppose I should have mentioned that that flexible $2500 included everything, so it is actually ~$2500 less monitors and peripherals for the system itself.

Following up on your proposed build, I've been doing a bit of research which has made me see things a bit differently. I hadn't thought about simply building a <$1500 machine every few years rather than trying to spend a lot more on one that I can potentially get another year out of. Interesting - so yeah, I now see that it is probably more cost effective in the long run to simply build to the current (and future near term) intended use of the system.

I have a few follow up (noobish) questions:

1) Can one graphics card simultaneously support two (or three) monitors, both in terms of performance and physical connectivity? I've looked into what it will cost to run a three monitor gaming setup, and it is a bit excessive for what I plan to do, so if it matters for your answer I only plan to use the second monitor for productivity purposes.

2) How extreme is the difference between the performance of the i5 and the i7 when it comes to performing tasks in Excel? I don't typically work with enormous datasets, just financial models, some of which can get pretty large and complicated and do tend to bog down my 2011 Macbook Pro. I'm running a 2.2GHz Intel Core i7 with 4GB Memory in this. I'm asking here because I see it is possible to save some money by going with an i5 without impacting my gaming - a slightly less robust Excel experience is acceptable to me.

3) I hope to be able to play Rome:TW2 on high settings when it comes out, I know we don't have a great deal of information on what that will take but wanted to throw this in mainly to determine the degree of overkill I might need planned into the machine.

4) I've realized now it is pretty important for you to know what kind of resolution I will be gaming at. Well, I don't know... But I've got the budget in this build to tolerate something at 1920x1200(or 1080). It looks like quality monitors larger than this scale pretty poorly in price.

I'm going to try to take advantage of any black friday/cyber monday deals that meet or exceed the standards of my build, then fill in the remainder of the slots the following Tuesday. I'm not sure I have the expertise to know what a deal looks like, so will probably end up just building to whatever list we come up with by then unless something clearly stands out to me as a major deal.

Thanks!

Best answer selected by Mark11B2P.