~ Help with new gaming rig, pleaaaase! ~

[deadfish]

Hey everyone,

I'm planning on building a new gaming computer as a present for my brother's birthday. He's a pretty hardcore gamer, so I thought it would be nice if I got him a state of the art setup. I've been sifting through sites and reading reviews of different parts and setups trying to decide what's best, but I figured you guys would most likely have a good idea of what's top of the line right now.

Money is not an issue, so go nuts in designing the best gaming computer! Thanks in advance for all your help, guys and gals! I appreciate it. :)

[smoooge]

Ok, my dream gaming computer right now:
Quad Core CPU
Motherboard with 2xPCI-x16 video card slots for SLi. *only use SLi with a mobo that has both PCI-x slots running at least 16x simultaneously.*
2x GeForce 8800GTX Extreme 768MB...in SLi.
4x WD Raptors in Raid0/1
4GB PC3 RAM
Watercooling for your GPUs

...get a bigass power supply, cuz if you have all of that...you'll need it.

[Bigeme]

well if money isn't an issue than what he said. I would go intel over amd. I have a raptor and I don't think it is worth it. Its loud and not significantly faster, maybe not even noticeably. Try to get a flash drive (i think they make 32 GB ones now - don't think thats quite enough, but if they are like 75ish it would be perfect as a boot drive).

I just looked it up. If money REALLY is no object:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609245

More reasobaly a couple of these in RAID
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183090

You might want to do some research. I know these are primarily intended for laptops and I don't know that much about them. Supposedly they will drop in price shortly and have better performance.

[deadfish]

Wow, thanks for the awesome suggestions guys! I had researched most of what you mentioned, but was unsure if that was the really good stuff, so thank you for the input! It is very much appreciated. :) I'll do some more reading into flash drives and the lot and I'll let you know what I decide on! If you (or anyone else) has any other thoughts, I'd love to hear them!

Thanks again, guys!

[Bigeme]

Just asking, how much are you willing to spend on this?

[Bigeme]

If you haven't committed anything yet, I was speaking with my brother and he said someone had several of these SS drives in a RAID array and got amazing speeds out of it.