The Gaming PC Building/Upgrade Thread

[Venji]

My brother was thinking of upgrading his PC, but is it really time?

His Old one :

Q6600 cpu

4GB Ram

8800GTX 

The new one - http://www.meshcomputers.com/Default.aspx?PAGE=PRODUCTVIEWPAGE&USG=PRODUCT&ENT=PRODUCT&KEY=945125

 

• BitFenix Colossus Gaming Chassis ( looks pretty cool)
• 950W X-Power Desktop Power Supply ( way over spec'ed but love the leeway that gives for SLi)
• ASUS P8P67 Pro (SLI/CF) Mainboard - Intel 2nd Generation Core™ i - LGA 1155 / ATX ( possible 4 card  SLI! but unlikely to do more then 2 cards tbh)
• Intel® 2nd Generation Core™ i7-2600K Processor (8M Cache, 3.40 GHz) - LGA1155 ( great reviews and test results)
• Akasa Freedom Tower Quiet Heat Pipe CPU Fan ( good brand of fan - much better then  standard)
• Your choice of an Intel SB-i5/i7 professionally overclocked up to 4.8GHz ( tempting..as I never normally overclock)
• G.Skill 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Memory (2x4GB*** ) ( maybe go for 16? The Max requirements for games always double after 3 years.)
• 1536MB NVIDIA Geforce GTX580 Graphics Accelerator ( Just one....for now )
• 2TB SATA3 6Gb/s 7200rpm 64MB Cache ( More the merrier)
• Blu-Ray Combo Optical Drive (12x BD-R Read, 16x DVD Writer) ( Blue ray movies to link up to his 37" LCD )
• 7.1 High Definition onboard sound card - for 8 Channel Cinema sound (fine for games, but might get a Creative)
• Microsoft® Windows® 7 Home Premium pre-installed  ( got it)
• Free Microsoft® Office 2010 Starter Edition (pre-installed OS required) (have 2007 anway)
• Free Cyberlink Video Editing Suite - 7 titles (oem) (pre-installed OS required) (which he will never use..)
• BullGuard Internet Security ver. 10 - 90 Day Trial (pre-installed OS required) (annoying)
• 2x IEEE1394 Firewire (onboard) ( useful)
• Free 3 Years Gold Warranty - inc 3 Months Free Collect & Return (I miss onsite, it made pre-builds worth it )

Thats the basic specs he is thinking of, but we might build it ourselves as no companies do onsite warranties anymore and it's much cheaper, however I don't like overclocking anyone elses PC ( bad memories from back in the pentium 1 days), so it's tempting to let these guys do it as money isn't really a major issue for my brother.

The build will be apx. 3 times faster for every major component then what he has at the moment, he also uses it for work ( Visual studio mainly) so it's worth investing money now to improve productivity.  

In 6 months the Ivy bridge processers will be out, in a year we will finally have 8 core processors and the next Gen of Graphics cards. So the question is -  Buy now, or wait?

The other plan is to just upgrade his Ram to 8GB  and get a GTX570 for Gaming needs.