I am going to be building a gaming tower.. What I was wondering is, What tower you would buy and why? what hard drive? What graphics card? What audio card? What motherboard?

I was thinking somewhere around a 10,000 rpm hard drive??? I have the need for speed!!!!!!

depends what you want to spend. For cases ive always like thermaltke and lian, get a big enough power supply/enough cooling. For motherboard/processor depends if you go intel or amd and what socket the processor you get needs. Graphics do you want SLI, Crossfire (get power supplies rated for these) or a single graphics card. (I like NVIDIA over Radion but thats me). What operating system, 32 bit or 64 bit. That will make a difference how much ram to get. If you want fast hard drives might want to look into the 15000 rpm drives then. You could also do raid 0 for more performance if you get 2 hard drives. As for sound you could get a seperate card but lots of the new motherboards have 7.1 already on them. Some people claim they are not as good as a dedicated card but to each there own.

build??????????? there is no way you can build one AS GOOD AS THIS or even close for the same price with the SAME COMPONENTS....these blow anything away......noone builds anymore....just the AURORA ALX has DUAL NVIDIA 8800's and thats the cheap one.....you want fast and top quality.....get one of these....build......now thats some funny chit

http://www.alienware.com/product_pages/des...ll_default.aspx

You have no idea what you're talking about. I just built an Alienware PC with the same specs as the one my brother just built, $2300 compared to $1300 to build it himself. Building computers might not be worth it for novices like yourself.

To the original poster, the processor to get now is the Intel Quad Core E6600 2.4GHz. You'll want 2-4 GB of ram at 800-1066 MHz with low latency. If you want a fast hard drive go with a Western Digital Raptor 10k RPM 160GB. For cases or motherboards, check out tomshardware.com Your best bet for a graphics card right now is a Nvidia 8800 GT.

thanks for the great info TeamGreen02.. your preferences and why you prefer them is exactly what I was looking for.. thanks again

Keep the idea's comming every1...thanks

what games do you play?

Im a huge gamer, but my machines more than enough for the games i play (im still rocking countrer strike source ffs)

..alienware are expensive as hell. The only thing they might have a deal on is they get budget XP/Vista - offsets high hardware cost.

I priced alienware system to get you rolling. To build (excluding XP/vista) it would cost $700ish, to buy, $1600


Use www.newegg.com - best deals, solid return policy. Ive RMA's stuff 9 months after purchase for replacement. DOA Motherboards, RMA - never have a problem. They dont normally cross shit RMA, but I have bought probably 10k of shit from them in the last yr, so they let me get away with more than normal i think.


One thing to note, you can use your current pc's windows key. If you dont have a plain windows disc, you can buy an install disc (no license) from ebay for $10.


..another thing. I have had 2 raptors fail on me in less than 1 year of high use (18 hrs a day, raid0)

I have given up some speed to avoid this. Another thing - raptors raid0 werent as impressive as a regular drive raid0. Single, they rocked.. But truth of matter is, larger drives now (sata2) have low seek times on front portion of disks. So if you grab a 300 gb, partition 20 for XP, 180 for office/misc programs, 100 for file storage, then another drive, partition 100gb for games, leave 200 for music/media - works pretty well.

I would not advise loading shit aside from music/media on the back half. Small files - like applications - would be terribly slow. Talking 15ms - vs 5 or so on the front half.


Personally, building a machine takes a lot of variables. Need for space, how hot is the room you run in, how loud do you want it to be, do you want liquid cooling, how much money you going to spend, etc.

Really, any $250 processor, 2gb of mem, $250 video card, and a solid asus/msi motherboard and you will be happy with performance. HDD's are up to your needs. Do you just use for gaming? then get 2 sata2 300 gb's and raid0 them - partition as well. If you dont mind stability issues (ie, you will have a media/backup drive in your system) then hell - get the raptors. But remember, fast doesnt always last.

Also - im not a fan of these 1066mhz bus chips that are overclocked to 13333. Im guessing they will run hot, so if cooling/airflow/ambient temps is an issue, I would avoid. The 1333 mem hasnt been impressive. and usually have to manually up clock speeds to hit your 1333 mark.

oh yeah - cases, simple is usually better. Lian Li makes solid simple cases. Doors and shit always fail, rattle, squeak. Side panels are good - but usually not filtered for the fans that are on them. So mixed blessing.
Top Fans are a must!! They help keep case temps low, the back fan isnt enough. Powersupply and system heat will pool around your powersupply. PS fans arent meant to cool cases + ps, just PS. So a top exhaust will help a lot.

Antec , Sparkle, and Rosewill make solid powersupplies.

I prefer Asus for intel motherboards, MSI for AMD.

I prefer Intel for handling math processing better (business type apps) + solid performance on games (e6700)

Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin make solid memory. Keep an eye on latency and whats recommended for your board/chip

WD Raptors ok, prefer Seagate for HDD longevity. WD usually only last 3 yrs. Seagates last 6-7. Sata2 is way to go. If price isnt a concern though, you still cant beat SCSI drives. Just loud.

Nvidia still dominating graphics game on the $ per performance segment.

Soundblaster Fatality is a joke. My old Audigy had less issues. More isnt always better in sound segment. Esp if youre going to use junk speakers.

Monitors matter. Whats point of high res card when you have flat blacks and ghosting. My Samsung syncmaster 226bw does well. Great picture. Awesome blacks/greys. I run 2 monitors (Westinghouse for 2nd) on 1 card.



I am not a fan of overclocked graphics cards. My EVGA runs 10% faster than other cards - but at a price - TEMPS. My temps will cook if my ambient temp was above 70. In a room, this will bring up the room temp to 80 in a hurry. I keep my ambient temps about 60.

SLI is a joke if you cant cool them. Hot cards dont run well. And most cases can fit SLI sure, but never enough airflow for 2 monsters running at 140degrees each. If you go SLI, go watercooled

To buy is just throwing money away,i built my computer thru newegg.com and at the time i had sli(2 video cards) and compared with alienware or other makers i built mine for over $700 less than they wanted,building is easy.I went by the ratings on the hardware all people put on them,my original build was a ZION TOWER,2 74GIG RAPTOR 10,000RPM HARD DRIVES,2 GIG OCZ MEMORY,2 7800 NIVIDIA EVGA VID CARDS,DFI LANPARTY BOARD,AMD 3700 PROCESSOR,TRUE POWER 550 POWER SUPPLY,ALL BUT THE POWER SUPPLY HAS LASTED 3 YEARS,ooops caps lock,i replace the dead power supply with a thermaltake 700 power supply,upgraded the processor to amdfx60 and video card 8800 evga nividia,recommend the 8800 evga as that 1 card does almost better than 2 7800"s,recommend any western digital raptor 10,000 rpm as very reliable and 2 or 3 in raid allows you to be loaded a lot quicker in games(cod4) than other players,ocz is great reliable memory and the dfi boards are great for gaming,although intel has gotten better at gaming,amd used to be faster for gaming purposes and intel better at graphic rendering.hope some of this helps ya,and if you get cod4 look for the server bostonbattlefields,or look up the web site www.bbf-clan.com,i am a member there!

700 less eh? that means you got 700 less stuff like BLUE RAY ....go here to see what you lost out on

http://www.alienware.com/product_detail_pa...DEFAULT#pdp-nav

yea,price each piece out,go to newegg,compare,2 years ago blue ray was not the IN thing yet!

I just built a computer. search around for deals, they are out there. buying alienware (oh yeah doesn't dell own them), dell, hp is worth it and isn't. if you want one that all u do is flip it on and go, thats the ticket.

want the best bang for you buck, piece it out and build. i figure building you are not saving any money, but getting more for what u buy.

i paid 1250 for my new computer

intel q6700 quad processor
680i evga sli motherboard
8 gb sli ready ocz ram
2 - 250 sata hard drives
samsung dvd burner
8800 gtx graphics card (gonna buy another soon)
850 watt silverstone power supply
tuniq cpu cooler
antec 900 gaming case (the only case to buy, period)

i have dual 22 inch samsung monitors

its a pretty nice setup, and beats the hell out of alienware.
novice buyers go to newegg, excellent place. i do most my shopping there.

Besides their Laptops, Alienware is the biggest rip-off. You can custom build a 4000 dollar alienware gaming computer for a little over a grand by custom building it all.

I just built a high end gaming rig thru new egg myself. Ill post the parts i used. I did reuse my case, but if i hadn't i would have used a 1200 or the 900 antec case for superior air flow. As for the 64 bit vs 32 bit, most games play better on 32 bit alot will not play at all on 64 bit. The only real bonus to 64 bit is being able to run more than 3.25 (4 gigs on the board but windows only sees 3.25 gig) of ram.
I personally like AMD processors more than Intel but to each there own.

Antec 900 case
OCZ Game Extreme 700 watt power supply
Windows XP SP3 Pro 32 bit
MSI K9A2 Platinum AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard Has 4 PCI E slots for running sli
2X BFG 8800 GT 512 OC'ed Nivida cards running in SLI
AMD 9850 Phenom Black Edition Processor runs at 2.5 GHz and its a quad core
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer 7.1
OCZ Reaper HPC 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel
Samsung dual layer dvd burner SATA
2x Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Running in raid 0

Why would you even consider telling someone to buy an alienware PC. There over pieced POS machines made by DELL. That right there should give you common sense to stay away from them. Custom build your machine so you can make it to your needs and wants.