How should I start building my PC?

[Soleron]

Infamy79 said:

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Oh come off it, I built a Core i7 box 6 months ago for $1500 AUSTRALIAN where everything on the planet costs double. That was with 2 hard drives and a 9800GTX+ too. I could have cut that cost down plenty if I didn't skimp.

I just priced a Corei7 system on NewEgg for $765 which was a Gigabyte Motherboard, 2.6Ghz Core i7, 3 x 1GB DDR3 RAM, 9800GTX+, 400GB HDD, Case w/ 500w Power & DVD Burner. Could easily save more by going for a cheaper video card, single stick memory, smaller HDD.

There you go then. The 9800GTX+ is too weak to be paired with an i7. If you saved $150 (USD) on the CPU by switching to an X3 720 you would see maybe 5-15% difference [compare the i7 920 in games to the X4 720]. If you then spent that $150 upgrading the 9800GTX+ to two 4870 1GBs in CF, you would see DOUBLE framerates. That screams unbalanced, if you had the money you should have spent way more on the GPU rather than the i7. The i7 only makes sense once you have a 4890/GTX275 class GPU.

I'm not denying you can build an i7 system as cheap as I said, just that my system would actually be faster in games due to the extra GPU budget.