The million dollar PC, We can rebuild him, better, faster,stronger. Options

[AC9breaker]

Yeah, after years of saying I was gonna do it, I'm finally doing it. Building myself a PC. I've been trying to read up as much as I can on stuff and have been browsing newegg speculating. Anyway, I figured this would be more productive if I got some input for you guys. Primarily this is gonna be a gaming PC, but I at the very least want this PC to be relevant for 5 years, and I'm gonna be using it for more then just gaming. School, musings, w/e. Possible I'll be leaving the PC on for long periods of time so maybe cooling will be a factor?

I like me some nVidia chips and I'm not planning on overclocking (yet) so intel is fine with me. Any ESD precautions I should take and such would also be appreciated. I'm planning on working with a 900 dollar budget for the rig itself. But it's flexable. So... show me ya moves!

[Crushinator]

This went a little bit over budget, but I think its a good powerhouse for what you're looking for. I suppose if you make the HDD smaller (like 500 gig or whatever) and ratchet down the CPU to like a Q8200 you could still have a reasonably good gaming computer.

NZXT Hush Black Tower


I just like the design of this, I've used it to build machines in the past. Case choice is largely aesthetic of course, but also consider ease of accessibility to the parts inside in case you need to add/move/replace something. Airflow is also important if you start adding a lot of extra hard drives and such.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66ghz

Best bang for your buck CPU these days.

EVGA nForce 750i SLI Motherboard

I've had great experience with EVGA as far as tech support, warranty, drivers, and hardware quality with their motherboards and video cards.
They also have a trade up program, so if an upgrade to the hardware comes out you can send them yours and just pay the difference to upgrade (within a certain time frame.)

OCZ 4GB (2x 2GB) DDR2 800mhz RAM

Almost any ram will do, but high performance tested stuff with the heat dissipators will serve you better in the long run. Just make sure you get a brand with a lifetime warranty, in case something happens. Corsair, OCZ, Patriot, and others have a lifetime warranty.

BFG nVidia GForce GTX 260 896mb version

Any card from the GTX series is ridiculously powerful, even the "mere" 260's are insane. Since the motherboard is SLI compatible, you could add a second one of these in later if you wanted to juice even more video power.

Corsair 550w Power Supply

Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB HDD

The Black series HDD's are made for high performance and longer uptimes, but they do take a bit more power than the Blue or Green series.

68-in-1 Card Reader

Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit

Samsung 22x DVD RW

Grand Total: $963.90