Current best performance/price system sugestions

[impar]

Greetings!

What is, in your opinion, the current best performance/price system?

Following pieces to be considered, along with my sugestions:
Case - with 120mm fans
PSU - good brand, at least 35A in 12v
Motherboard - P965 based
CPU - C2D
RAM - 2GB
Video card - 8800GTS 320MB or X1950/7950
Hard drive - Raptor + a large one
Monitor - 19" 5:4 or 22"16:10

Updates have been posted through the thread.

[Gilly]

Asus P5B-Deluxe if overclock, standard if not

E6400

8800GTS 320MB

Seasonic 600w ish, corsair 520w

OCZ PC6400 2GB kit, cheap in the UK

150GB Raptor (best price/ GB of the raptors)

erm, 22" Panels aint that good imo, i dont like the TN panels most of them use, that said, the Samsung 226BW or whatever its called looks ace.

Other than that the 931C 19" screen from samsung is good, 20" Dell IPS panel, and NEC i have but its expensive

[krips]

Seasonic 500w is 580w whereas the 600w is 608w.

[dreddnott]

If you need space, get a Thermaltake Armor case when it's on sale. 5.25" bays all the way down the front of it, BTX and EATX support, and an extra 3-drive cage by the PSU.

Speaking of the PSU, I'll say that 500W-600W is more than enough for nearly anybody as long as you have three or four +12V rails. I personally prefer Thermaltake.

Motherboard, definitely the 650i/680i hybrid chipset - the ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus is a great example of this. You get 3 PCI Express x16 slots (1 at 8x), a great memory controller, and support for 8GB of RAM, 1.33GHz FSB and quad-core CPUs. Fairly future-proof excepting DDR3 and any new sockets that Intel might come up with.

E6400 if you're overclocking, E6600 if you're not. The Intel price cuts in a couple weeks are going to put the E6700 squarely in the place of the E6600. This is in response to the recent AMD price cuts, which are good but not good enough.

Video card is tougher. If you count eBay, the 7950GX2 is the best single-slot option as it can be easily had for $250-$300 there. Sometimes it's outperformed by the 8800GTS, sometimes it's not, and some people aren't going to upgrade to Vista/DX10 any time soon. If you want to be future-proof right now the 8800GTS 320MB is probably the best choice. ATI/AMD's R600 is going to change things a bit when it comes out, hopefully NVIDIA will lower its prices right now.

RAM - pqi makes dirt-cheap 2GB sticks, in two different lines. I got a pair of the 2GB DDR2-667 CAS4 sticks for $130 apiece. 4GB for $260, and Anandtech claimed to have been able to overclock these same sticks to DDR2-940 at 5-5-5-15. By getting higher-density sticks you allow yourself to use the extra slots when you upgrade your system later on (you did buy a future-proof motherboard, didn't you?).

HDD: Ugh. I can't bring myself to justify buying a Raptor. Faster 15K RPM drives have existed in U320 SCSI (and SAS) for years, and they now cost less per gigabyte than an equivalent WD Raptor, but you'd have to buy a suitable controller card which would even things out (but save your CPU some work!). With 4GB of RAM the HDD isn't going to matter so much unless you power off/reboot your computer more than once every few days. 750GB commands too much of a premium, so 500GB is obviously the sweet spot now. I'd say Hitachi would be the best buy, unless you really really like Western Digital.

Monitor: I still can't bring myself to game on any LCD, let alone one that has a 5:4 or 16:10 aspect ratio! Most games don't support widescreen anyways, or gain any advantage from it. 21" and 22" CRTs have become so cheap now that if you have the desktop space they're great for gaming and work at up to 2048x1536, and you can sit your LCD screen on the desk next to it if you really want one (get a pivoting one and put it in portrait mode, great for chat and the Internet).

[rahul]

About the PSU i will suggest corsair 620w ...... its a really good power supply .......

and i also heard that the newer C2D CPUs doesn't overclock that well ...... i will suugest u to go for E6600

if u are getting a display which does more than 1680x1050 then get the 640MB version of the card rather than 320MB .....

[onepairofpant]

corsair ram is on sale right now, 2gb of corsair ddr2 800 for only 130 dollars

[dreddnott]

Isn't that 2x1GB, CAS5, though? Link me!

[onepairofpant]

[xdkx]

I was thinking of proposing a thread like this--one that would be updated as necessary with a product list (CPU, motherboard, RAM, video card, cooling/heatsinks) and details for:

The best performance:price with low cost ("poor" overclocker's system),

the best performance:price with less regard to cost ("not so poor" overclocker's system),

the best performance:price at stock with low cost, and

the best performance:price at stock with less regard to cost.

People could mix and match items from the different lists to meet their needs

Anyone have the time, knowledge, and good will to do that ?

[Gilly]