Please forgive

There nothing wrong with the build. You could probably would be OK with a 6400 rather than the 6600. While I'm not a gamer, that card looks pretty high end for the resolution you're playing at. If money isn't a series issue, may as well go for a bit of overkill.

Just don't get it from foxconn, I read they are no longer providing customer support (that or they soon won't provide any) in the US, buy from a "better" brand such as eVGA, BFG, or XFX.

Instead buy from a brand that buys from Foxconn and puts their stickers on it like eVGA or XFX .

No seriously customer service is important, I just thought calling those "better" brands was a little funny. (I'm not sure BFG uses Foxconn as OEM but eVGA and XFX are known to.)

I know the card is pretty over kill for the rather low res I normally game at but the way I look at it I can spend that now and use it for years and run most games maxed out for some time. I dont upgrade often I am moving from a 1Ghz Thunderbird from 2000 so this is a MASSIVE leap forward. LOL

Hmm, well, that makes it a bit hard to say what would be the smart way to do this, such a powerful card today, but 2 years down the road... Think of it this way, I own a 6600gt that is currently about 3 years old, but I'm able to still play a lot of games at 1600*1200 even with some detail enhancements, such as half life 2 and get a very nice 70fps (though that's because I have a dual core and it's multithreaded game) and sometimes over 200fps when I'm not moving in a small area. I can't say I've played fear on my computer or any recent games, but my friend can play almost all games but oblivion at a decent 1280*1024 with hardly any lag on integrated gfx, so you're giving the future games too much credit. I'd only get this card over the 8600gts/ultra if you plan on getting a slightly bigger display down the road with a bigger resolution, at least 1440*900 to say the least

Hey now my current rig is not to far from that at all actually. As a matter of fact it was origonaly almost identical to that I had the same ram and cpu but I had a Voodoo 2 vid card. Then I upgraded to my current rig an AMD Thunderbird 1ghz, 512MB pc100 ram and a Geforce2 vid card, then I bought a Ati 9200 agp 4x card from a co worker for like 3 bucks about a year ago. And now since I can't really upgrade this much anymore at least not cost effectively I am going for the ground up build posted above. Needless to say it is going to be a MASSIVE change from what I have now I plan on ordering sometime next week.

Actually slightly funny side story. I told my mom I was buying a new pc (im 27 by the way) she does website design for texas A&M and she was telling me to check out Dell since my new rig is just under 2 grand. I have no problem with Dell they do build good computers especially for those who aren't really familiar with the components or who only do email or word processing but if you want to game or do video editing you can get a better price building yourself and so just to ease her mind I went and priced something similar and it was 2500 not including shipping, and that was with a 7900gs vid card and 667mhz ram. I tried telling her you would be hard pressed to get a comparable system for what I am paying from any other retailer.

Matched "pairs" for 3 gigs? Math doesn't add up.........besides, you only need 2 gigs, more than that is a waste.

Your build is very good. You might want to consider the 320mb version of the GTS though.

However, your next purchase should DEFINITELY be a new monitor, 19" minimum, 22" preferred. Your monitor will outlast 2 systems, this one and the next.....it's often overlooked. You look at it ALL the time when you use your computer, and yes this is overkill for 1024 rez but your idea of "future proof-ish" is a good one.....however, it will all be an utter WASTE if you don't use that horsepower with a better monitor.

Basically what I'm saying is, if you have no plans to get a new monitor, then get a cheaper setup (primarily GPU). However, if you plan to add a new monitor (why not use 2?!?!!!) then your setup looks great.

Actually the ram is one matched pair totaling 2 gigs and 1 matched pair totaling 1 gig. And sometime in the future I am looking to get like a 19" crt and run dual monitors as you mentioned. Always wanted to run 2 since I used a dual set up at a summer camp many years ago.

Oh really I thought as long as you used matched pairs i.e. 2gb (2x1gb) and the additional 1gb (2x512mb) it would improve performance however small if any. But wouldn't it give me more memory headroom? I tend to run many applications at the same time for instance right now I am running winamp, yahoo messenger, a torrent program, email (with active virus scanning), seti@home (similar to folding@home) and fire fox with 7 tabs, I also tend to do audio editing and mixing with Acid Pro using rather large tracks (3 to 10 mb a piece with anywhere from 2 to 6 tracks) wouldn't the additional ram help with that?

Well it would still be matched pair one matched pair for the 2gb and one matched pair for the 1gb so i can stay running dual channel unless you are referring to the matched pairs being different sizes. I did want to add that since I know I just like you have seen countless hundreds of the "rate my new rig" posts shouldn't the just add a "My new Rig" section to the forums so at least they would all be consolidated.

Ok I did not know that having matched pair of different sizes made a difference. I can understand your point with people not doing their own research, I peronsally used this site and forum as well as others to work on what I wanted for my new build. I read reviews and posts in the forums to help educate me as well as just learning new info in general in regards to pc's. There is always someone here who can teach you something new if you just put forth a little effort.

Thanks I do try to get as much info on my own if possible. I have kind of wanted to get the 3gb's just to give me a little more room to work with. Thanks for your help and your posts are always a good read you grape ape etc all provide a great deal of knowledge to the rest of us.

*slips on highjacker's mask*
Whats up taco.

Hey tool, seen some of the crazy ski videos you linked. All I can say is ANIMALS! 8)

Taco I just thought of something that might be useful sorry to pull the lazy ass card on this one but do you have any reccomendations of a few good programs to give my new rig the once over to spot any trouble spots. I just got memtest86+ and cpuz do you know of any others that might be useful? Oh and woohoo had my thread hijacked. LOL

Sorry I wasn't more specific mainly programs for doing a bit of diagnostic work to make sure the system is in good shape before I start downloading the main bunch of programs (firefox, zonealarm, spybot s&d, ad aware, etc) Just want to give it a good once over to make sure my components are in good shape.

Cool thanks I actually don't plan on any overclocking however much I would like try it and frankly if I ever get in a position where I can afford it I will definately give it a go. I rarely upgrade so I lean more for longevity than speed which is why I am going a bit overkill compared to what I could get to just get by. The way I figure is by going big (for me at least) now I can get a longer life out of the system before needing better equipment. Plus getting into the lga775 I should get a pretty long life of upgrade ability until intel switches sockets. I have been following computers since I was about 18 im 27 now by the way and this seems to be the perfect time to do a major rebuild, the hardware being put out right now gives you so many options to get a powerful rig on the cheap compared to a few years ago. Plus with the lga775 intel is going to have a great series of cpu's coming down the line that all use it (until the socket switch of course) and that gives me a great upgrade path in the future assuming bios updates to handle the new cpus. All in all I am really glad I can build it now and didn't do it a few years ago.

I'm glad to see the random squirrels managed to help you out

yes they do 8)

Nice, though I'm wondering how did all of that cost $2k? I've seen e6600 650i builds for far less than that before, though it's the things like the raptors that add price quickly (which btw is now completely uselss, because the newer 7200.10 drives are competing with the 150gb raptor for load times, now just the data transfer rates for huge files are the main difference, but hitachi's tb drive fixed that)

Agreed, for that price, I would have gotten an e6700 instead and had juni117 @ xs build me a custom phase change that's all internal in the pc-v2000b case by lian li, get 2/4gigs of some crucial 1066mem that's on sale for just $130 right now, and then a p35 mobo with a smaller phase change for the nb and gfx, so that would take you to around $1400 if you went all out with the phase change stuff, get a cheap 500gb 7200.10 drive, those outperform the barracudas and are on par on most things with the raptor now, and finally a single r600xt, you can xfire it down the road, and it's supposed to be cheaper than the 8800gts 640mb, which it outperforms and you really don't need the gtx's power with the exception fsX, and oblivion really unless you have a massive 19200*1200 24" display