2nd Gaming Build

[shwarz]

My younger bro will be buying my current home-built gaming rig from me so I will have $2000 by August to spend on a new system and I have come up with this so far, image includes product/price/total from newegg.


Inquiries
1) Any professional experienced suggestions regarding parts?
2) Comparison in price/performance
a. Should I stick with the 650i or go up to the 680i?
b. Is the extra $ for the 768mb video worth it over the 640mb?
c. Should I spend the extra $ for the 6700 or not?
3) I most likely won't ever be using any SLI dual video card configuration, however I do want to leave the door wide open for upgrading CPU's (Quad-core, future 1333MHz cpu speeds). So I'm thinking that one of the two mentioned asus boards suits my needs best?
4) I didn't personally build my current rig per-say, I assisted a little and mostly watched as an experienced friend put it all together for me. I'm slightly hesitant about actually putting the rig together myself but I'm sure i will end up doing so, however I don't know if any of these parts will cause any conflict in performance or in physical space within the case, looking for a heads up in these areas as well.

Also, I'm not into over clocking as I haven't taught myself anything about it and I haven't looked much into raid configurations(thus I'm ignorant to both aspects) and I don't see either being extremely important to my needs for video gaming/video editing/school work.
I already have 5.1 speakers although I may upgrade later, and I will also be running Windows Pro SP2(already have it).

[Cricket]

I don't see any other threads started by you.

Cricket

[shwarz]

Ya I see that now, I did have a second one and as I was editing it I received errors and then it was no longer available and disappeared.

[kram 2.0]

A few suggestions. First off, if you are not intending to overclock your machine, you are best off using the heat sink unit and heat sink fan that accompany a retail purchase of the processor. In this case, you can exclude the Arctic Cooling fan. As you also mentioned RAID, it is, as you've concluded, a good idea to steer clear of it for the purposes you're going to use this system. If your data is at all valuable, any performance gain from a striping RAID configuration (RAID 0 system) is a bad idea.

I cannot address your question about the chipset (or SLI card), but I will suggest you take the lower amount of graphics memory. It is a tangiable number so manufacturers tend to put a premium on however small performance gains you get out of it.

Taking a step back, if you do not intend to built until August, you will see some noticible shifts in parts and prices. While planning is not necessarily bad, you may have to do this all over again given the rate that these manufacturers and companies release new products.

kram

[Kilauea]

Since you do not plan on overclocking, I suggest going for DDR2-667 ram as it will give u equally good performance.

Also, since you are building in August and I believe it is in Q3, then there should be a E6750 out for about 183$, it sounds like a great deal.

Finally, the PSU is a little overkill as you are not planning to go SLI and I would advise against it since it would end up costing you more than just getting a good card in a year or 2. I would suggest the Corsair 520HX for 124.99 which is plenty for 1 8800 card.

[shwarz]

Ok, I understand it's a little ways away from august but I needed to at least get an idea of the ballpark in parts/price to know what/how much I'm in for, I'll probably end up upgrading each piece to it's higher counterpart in the summer while maintaining the same budget.

However I'll do a little research and see how easy and effective overclocking really is and then i'll know to leave room for it or not. It's tempting to make your money go further by enhancing products you already paid for so we'll see.
Other than that I took the cpu cooler off the list and switched to the Corsair 520w PSU as suggested, and I also switched to the 640mb GTS instead.
The price of the 2GB corsair ram was $174 last night and today it's $308, but if it would have stayed the same then that would bring the over-all price down to $1700 before shipping.

Thanx for the advice