So I am in the process of saving up for a new rig.

As of now I have a
Antec Nine Hundred (keeping and planning on water cooling when upgrading)
AMD 64 3800+ 2.40ghz
1 GB DDR
2 60 GB Serial HD
Gforce 7300LE

I'm thinking of
Intel dual/quad core
4 or 8 gb ddr3
1TB SATA HD (going to partition)
4870 single or 4870 2x or crossfire 4870 or crossfire 4870 2x.

Any input?

Your on the right path but DDR3 still isnt fully worth it. Sure, its price has gone down a lot, but it has some latency troubles it needs to catch up on.

Also for the price of the 1TB you could maybe get 2x750 and put them in RAID1 so that you don't risk losing all your data.

thats a good idea :d thanks so much. but the thing is you dont really need 750 gb for the os, i think 100 is enough for the os hard drive and 750+ is perfect for data

100GB for an OS, lol what are you installing

I know it seems pedantic but RAID1 fail's, its just a pointless stopgap from RAID 5 IMO and lets be ohnest harddrive failures are a very rare occurence at best.

either do RAID5 or not at all.

and yeh the 4870X2 looks a cool card 2GB of GDDR5 lol epic

well think of it this way. the os its self (XP) will probably take at least a 1gb i dont remember the exact space it takes up. then you have to think about the games and apps ill be installing. and im sure 100gb is more than enough. as for the data part of the partition, torrenting being the most amazing thing in the world right now will quickly fill my harddrive.

I'm still debating on the 4870 2x i saw the benchmarks for it in crossfire and it wasnt as great as expected. then again they are mainly driver issues

games and applications dont come under the operating system criterea

Applications actually come under alot of people's "OS" partition. But games deserve their own partition. E.g. I have 2x 80gig WD Raptors for OS and Apps, and a 500gb for ISO's, 500gb for Misc/Movies/Music/Pictures/Etc, and a 500gb for games.

I know of a few applications that wont even give you an option of where to install them.

Anyway, lol 8gb of DDR3 ram, holy-motherfucking-christ why would you bother? That would cost like, 1 trillion dollars. You catch my drift. Forget about DDR3 ram now, and just get some high speed DDR2.

Go a Q6600 quad core, and overclock it. If you do end up watercooling the beast, it will run wonderfully.

Also yeah, get a 4870, or two.

Or wait for the x2 (two chips on the one board), and see how that performance/price compares to buying two 4870's. I'll be interested to see if Ati can get the issues with dual cards sorted, because all x2, GX2, etc cards have failed in the past.

Fry's had a good deal for the Q6600 but the mobo that they give you with the low end combos suck. I'm kinda waiting for them to pop out a Q9450 or a QX9770 combo. Cause with the higher end cpus they give some decent mobos. A question, can you do crossfire on an sli motherboard? I'm new to using multiple gpus and
never quite looked into it.


EDIT: after some googling it doesnt work that way. Its sad to see that no mobo out there will support both ati's and nvidia's multiple gpu capabilites.

EDIT2: After seeing a link on the SLI Patch and how its not working anymore it makes me think. Why doesnt ATI just try to make their cards complatible with SLI. It would shift the market so much to where nvidia will have to do the same. So then there will be no need for mobos that ONLY work with sli or crossfire.

can anyone recommend me a good intel crossfire board? I've been looking up on asus and all I see are complaints about how the board doesnt POST, under any circumstances.