help me build a pc!!

What's your budget? Are there any parts you don't need?

Anyway, this is a good place to post for advice: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/forum-13-322.html. Lots of ideas for lots of different budgets and someone will generally reply pretty quickly

techreport has ok articles every 6 months I think where they build a system at three price points.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17571

I just built the following system for about $460 bucks last month, to do exactly what you set out to do:

AMD Phenom II X3 processor (three 3 core processor)
Gigabyte DDR3 1600 motherboard
ATI Radeon 5770 1GB Video card (DirectX 11 capable)
G.Skill 4GB DDR3 1600 memory
650watt Antec power supply

So far I am very happy. I needed an upgrade from an aging AMD Athlon 64 system just to make my daily tasks more responsive, and to be able to play some new games on the side when im bored. The only games I've played on this thing so far is FarCry2 and Team Fortress 2. Farcry2 runs absolutely beautiful. Max resolution, max details, max effects, and it looks to be running at a silky 60fps at all times. TF2 is a much lesser game so of course that runs just as well.

I think this is a perfect *budget* build for someone who needs an upgrade to handle all the latest shit. Dont go for a core i7 build or any of that. It's faster, but unnecessarily faster. The price to performance ratio is imbalanced. You are paying way more for marginally better stuff. And you arent helping yourself down the road either as pc parts just depreciate in value anyway, something else will come along to kick the i7's ass and you'll regret your purchase. My current system should last a good 4 years running all the latest games.

thanks for the info all. Midian, I'm willing to spend 600 at most. Cheaper if possible.

NewbSaibot where did you buy your system from? That sounds like amazing value.

Which parts don't you need though? I assume you don't need monitor, speakers, mouse or keyboard? what about operating system? case? hard drive? if you already got most of this you can get something pretty good with $600. He most likely got those parts from www.newegg.com, that's the most popular site for parts in the states anyway.

I only need like a case, mobo, cpu, gpu, ram, optical drive, and hd. so the computer itself. Already have mouse/keyboard/monitors that I would want to reuse.

It's $600.93 after mail in rebates

yes I got this from newegg. Here's the exact inventory

Gigabyte DDR 1600 motherboard - $79.99
HIS Radeon HD 5770 1GB video card - $159.99
Antec Earthwatts 650W power supply - $79.99
AMD Phenom II X3 Black Edition processor - $119.00
G.Skill DDR 1600 4GB memory - $109.99

Now my invoice says $469.96, so I guess some prices have gone up. I also had a good promo code if i recall

I'd get the Phenom 3 core processor over the athlon 4 core. Hardly anything is multi-threaded beyond 2 cores and will remain so for quite some time. Plus the Phenom is clocked faster and is overclockable to the moon, so it will perform better pretty much forever.

I also really like the Radeon 5000 series cards. The performance is the same as the 48xx, sometimes maybe 1 fps less, but you get the benefit of DX11 games when they come out, so you might as well get next gen tech for the same price.

They are also handing out free copies of Dirt2 with Radeon 5xxx cards, which is pretty much the best rally game ever, and it's DX11.

sweet thanks i'll take both of these into consideration.

newbsaibot what case did you get with yours?

and what do you guys think of this:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17571/2

midian, is the setup you posted based on the intel i7? is that top of the line? because i don't mind going mid-value range to save some money, in fact that's what i'd prefer.

nope it's an Athlon II X4 620 basically the cheapest quad core processor there is, it definitely isn't top of the line. As NewbSaibot says it's outperformed in games by dual or tri core processors with a higher core clock speed when the game doesn't use all 4 cores (And most games only use 2), but most of those games will run fine on either processor anyway as long as your graphics card is good (You won't notice the difference between 60fps and 70fps for example). There won't be many games that you won't be able to run in top details on that setup, and in programs that use all 4 cores this processor will destroy a non-quad core processor, which imo makes it better for the future as a lot of stuff that will come out in the future will take advantage of the extra core(s). And it's not like you can't overclock it either.

Either choice is fine though and same with the graphics card, the 4890 benchmarks show that it's quite a lot faster than a 5770 but the 5770 has some features that the 4890 doesn't like DX11 support and you won't notice the difference between 70 and 80 fps anyways. It's just nitpicking whichever set up you go with but I just posted that setup as an example of what you can get with $600 (A computer that will run almost everything that currently exists at the highest details smoothly)

The parts I listed were the only parts I needed, I already had everything else.

If that system you linked is still $580 I don't like it, the 4850 graphics card is simply terrible

if I went for a system that was more in the $400-$500 range would it struggle with newer games? or would it be able to handle them as well?

It'd perform significantly worse, if you cut that much off the price the parts that are gonna suffer mainly are gonna be the important parts, the GPU and CPU. You'd end up with some piece of crap graphics card and CPU if you spent that much on an entire system

are you absolutely certain you need a new case, hard drive, dvd burner, etc etc? That is where you can shave off the costs and put it towards the stuff that matters, video and cpu.