Intel's Sandy Bridge CPU (2nd gen Core)

I haven't been in the market for a while, but frankly a Core i7 for $300 and some change that can be OC'd to over 5.0 GHz (on watercooling I imagine) seems like a good proc to me. I paid 275 for a core i7 last may and it's dealing with current-gen games fine (I have a GPU bottleneck with my two 7950 gx2s, but can still play the games at medium), so I'd probably go with the 2600K for the "unlimited unlock" capabilities.

It's been years and years since your CPU was much of a consideration for playing video games. As long as you've got a desktop cpu, it's all about the video card these days.

once the revised p67 boards ship i'm building a computer to replace a pentium 4 2.6c rig i built in 2003.

asus p6p67 pro
intel 2600k
intel x25-m 120gb
sapphire radeon 6950 2gb
corsair vengeance c9 2x4gb

i expect to be blown away.

of course there is better on the horizon. amd has an unknown quantity called bulldozer coming soon and intels own sandy bridge-e chips on the 2011 socket which will be higher end and feature 6 and 8 core cpus.

Conne, if you are really building a gaming computer, does that mean you'll get sucked into that miasma and forget all about your pals over here on SF?

Depends on the game. I know Starcraft 2 hits the CPU fairly hard compared to the GPU.

I think the i7-2600K is the best option at the moment. I would like to know more about whatever AMD is doing, but I don't think it will compare, and I don't think the nehalem/westmere class i7 extreme editions that are rumored to come this year are going to be worth looking at (that being the previous architecture).

My only complaint about the desktop sandy bridges releases is that the better desktop chips have the better gpu's, which seems to be the inverse of market expectations. People buying weaker sandy bridge chips are more likely to do onboard graphics, and people buying the i7-2600k are probably not going with the onboard graphics.

That being said, my current computer is still a core 2 duo. I don't do serious gaming (I'm still playing some 90's games that I haven't gotten around to in my spare time, and I'm doing those on an old late 90's system that is just for those games), but if I did serious gaming on a budget I would probably do a i5-2500K or i7-2600k system build. Probably with a set of mid-range graphics card in crossfire/sli configuration, although I haven't gotten that far.

Last year I would have probably been looking at an AMD phenom system for a build.

I plan to replace my current PC with a new one once the new P67 motherboards are out.

I5-2500k
Antec 903
Corsair HX850
EVGA 970
8 or 16 gigs of Ram
2 Tb HD

I can't wait for these stupid fixed mobos to be out so I can start building!

Not sure if it is worth it yet, but what about ditching the 2 tb hd and getting a solid state drive? I am curious about how much that would improve things....

You definitely want to go Sandy Bridge for the proc. Get a tiny SSD just to run software off of and some huge drives for storage. 8gb ram should be more than enough.

You don't need to get a really tiny one. I bought 120GB OCZ vertex 2 drives for laptop and desktop. They're sandforce drives (currently one of best performing) and i paid under $300 for them.

Also, some of the really tiny ones are kinda slow.

Definitely get a sandybridge cpu and 8gb ram. it's an extra 50 more than 4gb so why not. Get a video card in the $300 range and you should be good for a while.

Does using a SSD drive for the operating system really make that much of a difference?

hell yes. Everything is snappy all the time. Things load FAST. the computer wakes up FAST.

I don't know if they're much use for games, but having a lot of ram and an SSD really makes an improvement for regular usage. No more stutters and thrashing hard drive. I got an SSD and 12gb of ram recently and the difference between the old conventional hard drive and 3gb was... night and day. As big as when I upgraded from a 466-mhz Celeron to 1ghz Athlon back in the day.

ya it's not gonna increase framerate. if games load big files though, it'll decrease load times substantially.