Not literally, of course, but I need some info on building a fairly decent computer for gaming. I'll be playing games like FEAR, Oblivion, Doom 3, etc. I'm willing to spend anywhere between $800 - 1000 CDN

I've done a bit of research on video cards and CPUs but I'm no where near pulling together a list of necessary materials - I have no clue what soundcard/mobo/etc is suitable for me.

I was thinking about the Nvida GeForce 7900 GTX or the 7900 GT as the video card but that's about it

Oh.. by the way, I have very little experience in terms of building computers from scratch. ^^ Please enlighten me

actually, my budget is more like $800-1100 CDN

"I was thinking about the Nvida GeForce 7900 GTX or the 7900 GT as the video card but that's about it"

Big price difference between the GT & GTX...the GTX will easily wipe out more than 1/2 your budget.

You need a decent motherboard, CPU, RAM & power supply...& the power supply is critcal, especially since you want a high end gaming card.

Choose your video card AFTER you've selected the other components. Since you want a decent gaming system, you'll probably wanna go with AMD. Then you need to decide whether to go with a socket 939 or go with the new socket AM2. Next select a CPU...Athlon64, single or dual core? 1GB RAM (2 x 512MB) or 2GB (2 x 1GB)? HDD...probably SATA2? Power supply...plan on at least $75-100. Don't forget a case, optical drive(s), & floppy.

OK, how much do you have left for a video card?

By the way, since I'm pretty much a newb at custom builds, how important is the computer case? because I'm obviously not going to spend an extra $100 or whatever on a case that "looks better"

Are there any brands that I should look out for/aviod due to bad architecture?

@jam

Okay, I figured out some of the basics..

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ S939 Venice 2.4Ghz 512k L2 cache ($175)

HDD: Seagate Barracuda 250GB 7200.9 16MB SATA2 HDD ($107)

OS: Windows XP home ($110) .. expensive

RAM: Corsair Value Select PC3200 2x1GB DDR400 CL3 184Pin DIMM Dual Channel

I still have ABSOLUTELY no clue what sound card or motherboard I should get.. any suggestions?

go with the 3700+ if u can find one it has 1Mb of L2 cache which makes it a lot faster. sound card should be added later. motherboard: get an nF4 Ultra chip based motherboard for example DFI.

ATi Radeon 9600 PRO
AMD Athlon 64 3700+
Gigabyte K8NSC-939
1Gb Team Group DDR400
Maxtor 200Gb
450 Watts PSU
4 vents

Yea, do NOT get the 3800+...it's a waste of money. If you want a Venice core A64, go for the 3200+ & overclock it, otherwise go for the 3700+ San Diego as was recommended by Steging.

Look into the DFI nF4 Ultra Infinity motherboard.

Do you have Office Depot in Canada? They have XP Home Upgrade on sale for $20 after rebate. You don't have to install an older version of Windows & then upgrade, it can be installed on a formatted HDD provided you have an older Windows CD...you just have to pop it in the drive as proof of ownership of a previous version.

will that little bit of extra L2 cache make such a huge difference, though? I'll mainly be gaming or watching movies, no encoding or anything like that

Make sure you get a good graphics card before plopping the extra money down on the 3700. I'd say you should have a 7800GT at least before you start upping the CPU.

Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina!

www.redcross.org

if I had a choice between X2 3800+ and 3700.. which would be better?

For most games, the 3700 by far as of today. However, that may change as more and more games are optimized to take advantage of dual core.

If you want a dual core, consider the Opteron 165. Usually around $330, it offers 1M cache per core that the X2 3800 doesn't have. It's also quite the overclocker.

Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina!

www.redcross.org

Sorry to throw in something else to think about, but...you might REALLY want to think about this. Intel is releasing a brand new CPU (Called the Core 2 Processor AKA Conroe) in less than a month. Even the cheapest versions of this processor will supposedly match or surpass Athlon FX-62 performance. And as a bonus, they overclock like madmen. A whopping 4MB of total L2 cache, too.

Just something to consider. July 23rd is the release date.

If you can possibly hold off for a couple of weeks, you *should* be able to get a much better CPU for your money. Supposedly we are seeing the start of a CPU price war. I don't pay a lot of attention to Intel CPUs prices but I've already noticed a drop in prices for many AMD CPUs. Intel is expected to do the same. AMD is also gonna phase out several CPUs across the board...S754, S939, & even AM2 (already?). Here's several articles confirming it:

http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/10153

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20060622PR211.html

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189600858

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9001317

BTW, here's the XP Home deal explained:

http://www.spoofee.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36033

It seems L2 Cache is a big determining factor for a CPU... what excatally is this and how does it affect preformance?

I heard that L2 Caches is mainly used for video encoding and graphic designing.. true/false?

Actually, AMD is planning to slash CPU prices (some procs by almost 40%!!!) the day after Conroe (Core 2 Duo) is released. So whenever that day comes, wait one more day and you'll get a great deal.

-Matt

Now that intel has finally done away with its inferior Netburst architecture and adopting the more efficient per-clock cycle philosophy (Performance-per-Clock and also Performance-per-Watt.)we can expect Conroe and intel's forthcoming cpus based on the Core microarchitecture to be kick-ass gaming CPUs.

check out these preliminary tests, against its former heavy weight camp the Presler Dual Core EE 3.7Ghz, and AMD's Dual Core FX62.
Heads up AMD!! Take special note of the gaming benckmarks.

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/06/04/intel_conroe_performance_preview/1.html

Common sense not required

Should have read *follow up" to jackbomb's reply

Common sense not required