A while back, I posted some specs on what I felt would be a decent system. I recently went ahead and purchased the parts, with a few tweaks. The new PC will be primarily gaming-focused. Most of my Web development and internet browsing I do on my Mac.

I went with a Thermaltake Armor case. I’m trying the new Intel X38 chipset (on an Asus P5E mobo), two Radeon 3870′s in Crossfire mode, two Seagate Barracuda drives in Raid 0, and 4 GB of Corsair Dominator memory. I went DDR2 with this purchase, because DDR3 is so expensive and the performance gain is not worth it. For the CPU, I dithered between the Quad Core QX 6700 and the Dual Core 6550. One gives me four distinct cores, but very few games are optimized to take advantage of it. The other is easily overclockable, and with the above case and a Zalman cooler, I should be able to push the clock speed fairly easily without resorting to drastic cooling measures.

“Wait a minute!” You say, scratching your head. “You went with ATI?”

Yes, I did. I’ve always been an ATI fanboy. Their range of color and their effects have always been stellar, even if they don’t always compete with nVidia on a frame-for-frame basis. The new Radeon 3870 cards (obtainable for around $225 apiece right now) give comparable performance (about 10% less) than the new GeForce 8800GT. I haven’t yet seen numbers for Crossfire, but I expect that the scaling should give me a significant jump (although not as good as SLI) in framerate and performance. For a card that cheap to give me that kind of performance, combined with ATI’s reputation for pretty, I think I have a pretty good deal.

There is one caveat to the whole system build, though. I went with Windows Vista (Ultimate). *sigh* I have to buy an OS and I wanted something that showed DirectX 10 stuff. If it totally screws me on compatibility, then I’ll transfer my XP license from my current PC and endure Vista on my backup.

I’ll post some screenshots of the build as it goes up. Parts begin to arrive tomorrow, with the last shipment arriving Thursday. That means I should have a pretty good start on getting the system going by late Thursday night, early Friday morning.