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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rackhir" data-source="post: 1892752" data-attributes="member: 149">If you feel at all competent I would go the build your own route. That way you get to pick exactly what you want. I've never found the tech support for consumer products from the big companies like Dell to be much help. So you are probably better off providing your own tech support or leaning on friends/This Forum.I would strongly recomend considering one of the AMD chips. They are supposed to be tops for gaming and I've been very impressed with the performance of our new Opteron system. The AMD FX-55/3/1 chips are essentially a slightly modified opteron Chip. One thing to look out for in the AMD mother boards though is make sure that it does not required Registered ECC ram. They are MUCH more expensive and aren't as fast as the non registered DIMMs. The AMD processors have a direct link to memory built into the processor, so they can access ram much faster than the Intel chips which have to go over the system bus that is sharing bandwidth with a whole host of other system functions. So it's important to get the Lowest Latency memory you can. That's often refered to as the CAS rating and usually looks something like this 2-3-2-6, for good memory. The lower those four numbers are the better. New FX (Socket 939) motherboards are just coming out based on the nVidia Nforce4 Chipset. The high end models will let you use two PCIe graphics cards in what's called an SLI arrangement. You do have to use the same kind of graphics cards, but you don't have to get them at the same time. So you can get one now and then in a year or so once the price has dropped, pick up a second for a speed boost.You really do want to go with a MB that has PCIe slots, since the graphics cards are moving quite rapidly to that type of slot.RE: Your cards and high end machines question. Part of it is simply a desire to make more money and people who are buying the higher end graphics cards are usually looking at higher end system. Second, There are several bottlenecks in a system that can affect your performance. First of course is the processor. There's little point in having the ultimate graphics card if the processor can't process enough data to keep it occupied. So some games are Processor bound, meaning that the performance ramp flattens out at some point depending on the processor and a better graphics card will do little to improve things.Second you have the graphics card. In some games it is the limiting factor and a faster processor doesn't help because it can only texture and light so many polygons a second. Video Card memory is only rarely a limiting factor. Generally only with very new games and very old cards will the memory on the card be inadiquate. Doom3 is an exception, because the it has texture maps of such size that it can use 512mb in ram on the card to store them all for maximum performance. That said, 128mb on a card should be sufficient for the forseeable future. Ram and HD performance are two lesser factors in limiting the performance of your computer. Though inadiquate memory will kill your performance, having far more ram than needed generally won't produce any speed increase. HD performance does enter in to things like load times, but it's not critical. However it does affect the everyday performance for using the computer for practically everything else. So I would strongly recomend getting two smaller drives and configuring them in a RAID 0 set up. Most motherboards support various RAID configurations and two drives are almost always faster than a single larger drive</blockquote>

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