Going to be buying soon...

...and was wondering if any of you fine folks would be so kind as to take a gander at what I selected? Please keep in mind that I am not that hardware .... literate. A little, but not a lot :)

http://www.digitalstormonline.com/comploadsaved.asp?id=178979

Please feel free to suggest builds based on the criteria below. Thank you all in advance for all of the help!

ALSO: my budget I would like to be around $4000. A little over is fine. No more than $4500 please.

WHAT I PLAN ON USING THIS COMPUTER FOR:

Games (duh :P ), I like MMOs, like Ryzom, WoW, and such. I also intend on playing The Witcher on it, and Mass Effect / Unreal Tournament 3. I would also like to be able to play future games without having to sacrifice video quality. Crysis I couldn't care less about, so I am not using that beast of a game in my system.

For the online MMOs, I am also looking into a machine that is capable of video capture of at least 30 frames per second at high resolutions (Like 720p or such). Since most video formats look great at 30 frames, anything higher than that isn't required. I know that a fast hard drive is a must however, which is why I put that sexy Velociraptor in there :P

The games I play I would prefer to have 45+ FPS, running at 1680x1050 w/ AA 4/8x, all that jazz when not video capturing.

If you're concerned about additional space, I have some very large volume external HDDs that aren't needed to be fast. Just storage space :) So that's where all my videos (after being captured, of course), mp3s, etc are going.

So here's where I am getting at. With all that I said above, I feel that the rig may be more than I need it for. So here's where I am asking.. where can I cut corners on it? Is the Video Card(s) overkill for what I need? What about cooling? I want the CPU liquid cooled at least (overclocked), and the RAM overclocked. Is the processor going to be able to keep up with all of that, etc. etc. etc.

I have never used an ATI video card (except in the Gamecube :P ), but am not opposed to trying one. I've heard very nice things about them lately.

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MORE QUESTIONS?! Make it stop!!!
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I am not 100% sure about multiple cores on a CPU. Does each core run at x.xxGhz, or is that with all cores combined?

Does doubling up video cards give you twice the horsepower? Or is it only a moderate boost?

Would you suggest more powerful video cards? I am up for any suggestions =D

here you go This I think will do you much better. $4520

Edited by DST4ME - 29 Aug 2008 at 1:55pm

Thank you for your critique Mark.

I've never liquid cooled anything before, so the price DID come as a shocker to me. Your experience in it is vastly better than mine.

I really don't plan on going anything higher than 1680x1050. So 22-24" is about my monitor size. Any higher resolutions isn't that needed. (I'd just like the games to look as fantastic as possible at that resolution :) )

SLI is mainly used for super high resolutions then. I guess I could just have one card instead, and upgrade later if I feel the need to.

I will probably upgrade ... something in it in the next 3 years. I'll know when I get there though. 3 years is awful generous in the first place. Perhaps I should lop off that additional year.

Wow lots of posts now. I'll be taking in what you all said. Thanks for all of the help!


Edited by Jeremiah.L - 29 Aug 2008 at 2:08pm

I've read a lot of reviews that say the ATI 4870x2 gets REALLY hot (in the 90s in some cases).  For that reason, I would actually opt not to water cool it, at least not on the same loop as the CPU.  I'm not sure if it runs hotter than 2x ultras, but when I had my gpus on the same cooling loop as the cpu, it drove the heat up on everything.  the radiators simply could not dump that amount of heat fast enough...

well the if its that hot why not go with nvidia instead?