Haven't gotten it in the mail yet but I decided to have my current dream machine built.......

Case NZXT Lexa Blackline Gaming Tower Case - Black w/ Red Light

iBUYPOWER Labs - Noise Reduction Advanced - iBUYPOWER Harmony SRS Sound Reduction System

Case Lighting Cold Cathode Neon Light - Red

Processor Intel® Core™ i7 960 Processor (4x 3.20GHz/8MB L3 Cache)

iBUYPOWER PowerDrive PowerDrive Level 1 - Up to 10% Overclocking

Processor Cooling Liquid CPU Cooling System w/ 120mm Radiator [SOCKET-1366]

Memory 12 GB [2 GB X6] DDR3-1600 Triple Memory Module - Corsair Dominator

Video Card ATI Radeon HD 5870 - 1GB - Single Card

Motherboard MSI X58 PRO-E -- Intel X58 Chipset CrossFire and SLI Support Chipset w/8-ch HD Audio, Triple-Channel DDR3, Gb LAN, S-ATA Raid, USB 2.0, 3 PCI-E MB

Power Supply 850 Watt -- Corsair CMPSU-850TX Power Supply - SLI Ready

Primary Hard Drive 1 TB HARD DRIVE -- 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s - Dual 1TB Drives (2TB Capacity) - RAID 0 High Performance

Optical Drive 22X Sony Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive - Black

2nd Optical Drive 16X DVD-ROM Drive - Black
Flash Media Reader/Writer 12-In-1 Internal Flash Media Card

Reader/Writer - Black

Sound Card Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer

Network Card Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Network Card

Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium

Additional Software Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Software

Video Camera Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 2.0MP USB Interface WebCam

Advanced Build Options Professional wiring for all cables inside the system tower - Achieve exceptional airflow in your chassis

Advanced Build Options Tuniq TX-2 High Performance Thermal Compound - The best interface between your CPU and the heatsinks

Advanced Build Options iBUYPOWER Specialized Advanced Packaging System - Protect your investment during transportation!


Also, I recently got a 24 inch monitor, sidewinder mouse and keyboard, and Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX certified sound system for it

Total cost (not including the mouse, keyboard, sound system, and monitor....

just over 3k, but that's including the netbook I ordered as well, which was a cheap one just for class stuff.



Edit: To all of you people who want to share your specs: Download Speccy take a screen-shot of your system's Summary - it'll save you time.

hawt.

Amaaaazing. Congrats on getting a kick-ass computer.

My simple specs off the top of my head:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz
7600 GT
2 x1GB ram (don't remember what kind lol)
Asus P5N32-E SLI Motherboard

I built this three years ago for cheap. I realize the video card and lack of ram is bottlenecking the cpu a bit, but I had always meant to upgrade. The video card was from my old computer (which was being bottlenecked by the cpu of course haha). It's showing it's age, but there hasn't been a game yet that it can't play. Well, on low settings anyway.

My specs are currently:
Athlon II X2 250 3.0ghz
9600gt 512mb
1x2gb ram 667mhz
2x1gb ram 667mhz
80gb HDD
M4A785D-M Pro
windows xp pro sp3

but its my birthday very soon so im planning to get windows 7 64bit so i can make full use of my ram and also upgrading my cpu to a phenom X4 of some kind.

Nice choice on the ProMedia speakers, amazing setup.
What I'm running right now
E8400 4.5Ghz
Cooler Maser v10 heatsink
4gb ddr2@ 1ghz
Gtx 260 896mb graphics card
and a custom painted cm690 case.

Here's a screen-shot of my computer's main specs:



Unless you don't have the money, building your own computer is the only way to go about computers. If you really need a computer, a Dell or Compaq is OK, but be sure to reformat your system immediately. You won't want to have pre-installed crapware.

I don't feel fully content with this Compaq - I wish I had better parts, but a computer is better than having none.

To all of you people who want to share your specs: Download Speccy take a screen-shot of your system's Summary - it'll save you time.

I decided to sticky this thread.

Nice, Aphro. I would still go with two quadcore Xeons myself though. It would come out cheaper and Xeons are great. That i7 sill get the job done though.



That's key Chair. It really is all about how you maintain your system. One really doesn't need the awesomest stats.

Most of the stuff my machine runs was free:
Mobo: MSI 945GCM478(wasn't free, but I sold an old system to a neighbor, which paid for this board)
Cpu: Preschott Pent 4 HT 3.06Ghz, 800 FSB, 512MB L2 cache.
2GB 667 Kingston RAM
430W Thermaltake PSU(wasn't free)
Nvidia 9600GT GPU(wasn't free either, but I did a trade which made it cheaper)
400GB WD SATA HDD
My fans are stock, but my cpu fan doesn't need replacing. It has this turbine-esque fan on it that is noisy but works well.

You must have stuff mounted on virtual drives, eh?

I already posted my specs, but this looks much nicer. (And everyone else was doing it.)

Yeah just a few, 5 CD drives would be overkill otherwise

I might post the specs of my other computer sometime.

I noticed that lots of you are saving your images as JPEGs.

JPEG is a lossy image format, which means that you lose image quality. I recommend that you save most of your stuff as PNGs since it's a lossless format which has heavy support. The best thing about PNGs is that they don't lose quality, but they're often larger in size (MB) than JPEGs.

If you look at the pics below, you'll see that the top has no distortion, while the bottom one does:

I just built mine; I was kinda scared since it was my first build but everything turned out fine.
One cool thing with the EVGA x58 motherboard is OCing software that allows you to overclock without entering the BIOS. I know some i7's can easily reach 4GHz+ but it's just my luck that mine tends to run hotter than others so I leave it at 3.5GHz. I'm still using an old 19 inch CRT, but I plan on getting a 32 inch lcd in a few weeks.

Aphro, do you really feel the 12GB? How's it working out for you?

No one's going to feel the difference between 6GB of ddr3 and 12GB of ddr3 unless they are running a plethora of software that uses a lot of resources, kinda like rendering apps, advance financial monitoring and scientific software, stuff that mostly companies and super geeks would use. More of the same kind of RAM doesn't make a computer run differently unless the computer actually needs that extra memory to run whatever programs it's supposed to run. Of course things are more complicated with x58 architecture because the speed of the CPU and RAM are linked together via different ratios; if I recall correctly, i7's have memory controllers on their die and so messing with the CPU will influence the RAM.

skyscraper you are correct, but you never know who's running what on their boxes...remember Yokose Kanemoto?

Intel is about to pump out the next new "world's most powerful" CPU. It will be an i7 called Gulftown. Some of the first benchmarks for the Core i7-980X have just been posted on computer tech sites. It's Intel's first 6-core desktop processor; it has 6 physical processing cores and 6 logical cores, which means it's essentially a 12-core processor in certain cases. Intel said that it's first hexa-core processor would be called the Core i9, but they seem to have changed their minds. All of the i7s have 8 processing threads, while the i7 980x has 12 processing threads. This means it can hold its own against every other i7 when it comes to intense computing and any software that can use a lot of threads. IMO, it will be well over $1,000 US.

Personally, if I were puking up money I'd go for it in a second, but I'd rather wait till 2012 before I build a new computer or do a major upgrade. That's when we'll be seeing stuff like quad-channel DDR4 RAM which can run at speeds much faster than tri-channel DDR3 and hopefully solid state drives will be much cheaper. I've also heard rumors of Windows 8 coming by the end of 2011. By then, I'm sure the new CPUs based on a new 32nm architecture designed to crush Nehalem will be out and things will also be active in the GPU world too, just like they always are.

What's AMD's response?

It seems they're too busy making 16 core Opteron's.

Desktop 1 : Intel Celeron 900 @ 900 MHZ , 64 MB ram , 8 MB Video Card, 20 GB HDD. ( This one's 10 y/o).

Desktop 2 : Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.0 GHZ , 256 MB RAM, 128 Dedicated GPU ( Don't remember what ) , 80 GB HDD.

Laptop : Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 @ 2.2 GHZ, 2*2 GB DDR3 Ram, Intel GMA4500MHD, 320 GB HDD.

Getting a new desktop soon :3

i have a geforce 9800 GTX, its my little ticket to the virtual world