Alright, so my friend is going to be getting a new computer soon. As he is almost clueless as far as computer hardware goes, he's asked me to put together something for him. I'm no savant, and have what I'd consider average knowledge of this stuff. His budget is ~1.5k Canadian, and he intends to game on it extensively. Here's the list of what I'm going to set him up with:
Antec Three Hundred Case
Zalman CNPS9900 LED CPU Cooler for Socket 775 / 1366
Intel Core™ i7 Processor 920 2.66GHz w/ 8MB Cache
Asus P6T SE X58 w/ TripleDDR3 2000, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan, 1394, PCI-E, CrossFireX
Corsair 6GB XMS3-1600 PC3-12800 Core™ i7 Triple Channel DDR3 Kit (3 x 2GB) w/ Intel XMP
Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black 7200rpm SATA II w/ 32MB Cache
Samsung SH-S223B 22x SpeedPlus™ DVD-Writer, SATA, Black, OEM
PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad Power Supply
Samsung SyncMaster P2370 23in Widescreen LCD w/ DVI, 16:9, 2ms, Black (having his 800x600 old beige piece of shit hooked up to this thing would be a travesty)
This totals up to ~$1400 (Canadian). Most of the parts (power supply, memory, harddrive, processor, cooler) I'm pretty much set on. However, you may or may not have noticed that there is no GPU in that list. This is where the issue gets complicated. I have an old 8800GT, which probably could make for a quick-fix. With nVidia's new generation past Christmas, and ATI's 5800s debut, I'm debating whether or not I should recommend for him to shell out the money now for a GTX 260/4870(x2), wait until he gets a bit more money and go for a 5850/5870 (using the 8800GT in the meantime), or go in for the long haul and see what nVidia has up its sleeve. He's waiting for Windows 7's release to get the components.
The display runs native 1920x1080. Any ideas/input about the build, specifically what solution for the GPU? I'm more familiar with nVidia (if we go that route, going with eVGA) so recommendations on brands for ATI chipsets would be nice also.
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