I've decided that it's time to rebuild my Alienware. I'm talking about a complete overhaul. I've already purchased an ASUS M2N32 motherboard and a Seagate Barracuda hard drive. I'm also planning on purchasing a Thermaltake Toughpower PSU. Anyone have any suggestions on CPU, RAM, and video cards? And before I forget, I'm planning on running dual video cards with SLI. Thanks in advance for your help.

Ok, I am going to ignore cost here and just go for the cream of a very above average system. The branding is from my own personal good experience, even though there are plenty of people who have their own personal favorite brand names.

Processor = Brisbane 2.7Ghz Dual Core
Memory = PNY 4GB (2x2GB)
Video = e-GeForce 8600GTS 512MB DDR3 PCI Express x16, 400Mhz RAMDAC, 128-bit

I did comparison pricing on several other sites, but since you linked newegg, I tried to keep that style where possible.

Looks like a mean mother of a system. The M/B is for sure a monster with tons of highend capability with the right credit limit.

Thanks for the input, wheresthetruth. I knew I could count on someone who knew their stuff to chime in with some good advice.

First of all, I'd say scratch the whole AMD idea. Currently, Intel multiple core processors run much cooler than those of AMD, and are generally faster and more overclockable.

Second, the motherboard you chose does not support PCIe 2.0. For SLI, you're going to want the 2.0 capability, which will effectively double the bandwidth for the graphics cards. Here are my picks:

Mobo: ASUS P5N-D

RAM: 4GB OCZ Reaper Edition

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400

GPUs: EVGA 8800GT 512MB Superclocked SLI

The hard drive and PSU are good choices.

[edit on 8/17/2008 by iceofspades]

reply to post by deputydawg611

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The 9800's are out.

XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 is what I would get. As many as I could afford.

Check out this system for inspiration:

I can't imagine what it could do to games with the new Nvidia Physx drivers.....fap fap.

Looking at new computational methods for tomography—a technique used by medical scanners to create 3D images—University of Antwerp researchers have built a budget supercomputer using four Nvidia 9800 GX2 graphics cards (a total of eight GPUs with 1,024 stream processors) as its super-calculating soul, which "perform as fast as 350 modern CPU cores."

gizmodo.com...

I'm with Iceofspades on this one. Intel all the way at the moment. As much as it pains me to say so after being an AMD fan since the days of the first K7 Athlons, Intel really got things right again with the C2D design.


The E8400 is at a nice price/performance point at the moment, and lots of people are getting nice, easy overclocks from them.


As before, the 9800GX is a good choice, the ATI 4870 is a cracking choice too, albeit with the loss of native PhysX. A decent mid-range compromise is a 9600GT.

How much 3D do you need?

If I were you I would wait for the Intel Core i7 processors to be released, from what I have read they are going to be awesome.