I'm putting together a high end gaming system and want to know peoples thoughts about relative trades in component vs. performance in 3D gaming. Right now I'm planning on building the following: Athlon64 3800+ on a socket 939 ASUS A8V mainboard with 2 x Corsair PC-4000 CMS 512Mb, Western Digital Raptor 74Mb 10,000 rpm SATA, ATI Radeon X800 Pro, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, powered by OCZ Powerstream 520W. If I was going to make a single upgrade and had to choose between the following, which would result in better performance? 1. Athlon 3800+ to FX-53? 2. ATI Radeon 800 Pro to GeForce 6800 Ultra? 3. 1Gb Corsair PC-4000 to 2Gb Corsair PC-4000? Where are the relative trade offs at the high end like this? Any other thoughts or experiences with the machine I am building would be appreciated.

that IS one sick machine you're trying to build :D... 1. the FX-53 is clearly FASTER than the 3800+ (if financial is not a problem I'd go with either FX-55 or 4000+ both are faster than the 3800+) 2. The X800Pro performs better quality with eye-candies turned on, though I wouldn't recommend 6800U as it takes too much juice of your system but since you're getting a 520W, you're fine...go for it and I would also recommend you get the X800XT instead or if you lucky enough, the X800XTPE. 3. I'd stick w/ a gig of RAM as most games do not require 2GB, at least for today's games. Then again if you have an unlimited financial, i'd say GO FOR IT!!!...(instead of getting 2GB Ram, I'd go with another 74GB 10K Hard drive and set 'em as RAID 0 or 1) Good luck man...as in for me i'm stuck w/ this socket 754 but it blows my old setup out of the water...lol :D ~evans~ MSI K8T-Neo FIS2R A64 3400+ @2.3Ghz 1GB SimpleTech PC3500 Nitro ATi Radeon X800 XTPE Maxtor 250GB SATA HDD

IMHO, No No No I'd love to be "stuck" with ~evans~ rig... Skip

Ugrade the graphics card to X800 XT PE that will definetly make the most difference when gaming, as the pro only has 12 pixel pipelines, the XT has 16 and it makes a lot of difference. According to recent reviews the AMD 64 3800+ is almost as fast as the FX-53, not sure about the FX-55 but i think the only difference is clock speeds.

I'd drop the 74gb and go for two Raptors striped - big performance increase using RAID i found for little extra cost.

yeah but it would be even faster if he bought 2 74 Gb raptors and raided them, this is cos the 74 gig ones are faster than the 36GB ones, i found this out to my disapointment, although my system is still damn fast compared to my old sys rig 1st (bought of shelf) AMD duron 1Ghz radeon 8500 LE 128Mb some 5400rpm hard disk some 200Watt power supply 512Mb PC2700 ram rig 2nd (custom built) athlon64 3200+ (754) 1024Mb Giel RAM PC 3200 Abit Kv8 MAX-3 mobo 2x 36Gb raptors X800 XT PE audigy 2 ZS plenty of fans 400W power supply so stick with the 74GB raptor if posible get 2, and upgrade X800 pro to X800 XT PE

evans rig is a dream machine... Rig #1 Abit IS7 P4 2.8ghz eVGA FX5900 SE OCZ 1GB CL2 Rig #2 Asus K8N-E AMD 64 3000+ ATi 9800 Pro Samsung 1gb