Hardware recommendations
 

I'm looking to build a workstation to play some of the new games (COD5, StarCraft2, etc). I want to limit myself to $1200~

I was thinking of the following:

1. 4GB ram
2. Intel Q6600 CPU
3. Nvidia 9800 GTX?
4. Dual 500GB drives (Raid?)

I'm a mac boy, so I haven't been following the latest hardware. I have no idea of which motherboard to use, or if the nvidia 9700GTX is even that great of an SLI card to get. I did some research, but I was finding many results for older hardware, not what I was looking for.

Opinions?

Sell your car for a downpayment on this overpriced piece of shit.

But man, you'll get killer FPS for 3 months or so!

why not save the money, get games like COD5 on a console PS3/Xbox etc (around $200) then buy a PC that will run Starcraft 2, Diablo III etc when they come out and will be better spec'd and potentially cost less?

Motion sickness with big screen tvs.

The new Intel core i7 CPU will be out soon, real soon. No point in wasting cash on a q6600 unless you must have it now for some reason. Also forget the 9800GTX, get a Radeon 4870 or nVidia GTX 280.

That gtx card is gonna cost half your budget at least. Q6600 sounds good, so does the ram. Make sure you get ram that can be run together, dont know the exact term. Also take VERY good time selecting a good motherboard.

That card is $200 tops. The ram for 4 gb is $150 tops. It's the motherboard I'm unsure of.

I only ever buy Asus for motherboards. Asus P5Q is a nice board, installed one on the weekend for my father. The deluxe version is even nicer. Get a Velociraptor for C: and a 1TB for D:

Raid is nice is you can afford two velociraptors, but you can't use the Asus Express Gate if you have raid, which is pretty cool.

If you're getting 4GB ram, you're going to need a 64bit version of your OS.

I'm an ABIT freak since I got my NF7-S. Only decent athlon motherboard I ever had. I'd consider the ABIT IP35 Pro XE. As noted above, you can't use more than 3.5G with almost all 32bit OS.

I was looking at the Asus Maximus Extreme -- It looks pretty nice, but it's from over a year ago, so I KNOW they have something better. Yeah, I'll be using XP 64bit :(

..well, there goes any hope for decent driver support.

Yes, because Vista is /that/ much better :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Vista's likely to get new drivers released for a few more years. XP 64? That's already the new WinNT as far as support goes.

Third party drivers will still be developed because of the size of the XP user base.