Need a little help :(

[cantputt04]

Hi everyone. I'm currently serving in the US Army over in Afghanistan right now, and as such I am asking for some of your help. My internet access isn't what I'd like it to be, and I've been here for quite a while, so naturally I'm slightly out of the loop over what's come out in the past year or so. Last time I built was in August 2007, shortly after AIT released their HD 4870 (which I still think is an awesome card).

So my question is, given a budget of 3,000 (plus or minus anyway), what sort of hardware should I be looking into? Keep in mind, this will be in a couple months from now (I know the 6970 is coming out soon, not sure what else might also release from now till then). I apologize for the laziness of the post, but if I had more opportunity to properly research and catch up with what's popular these days. I remember in 07 DDR3 RAM was like, 300 bucks for a couple gigs, and now 8 gigs is like, under 100. Crazy times lol

I appreciate any help that can be given (also, I'm thinking of either a 2 monitor setup, or one big one and a couple of smaller auxiliary monitors on either side, though that second one might just be a weird fantasy of mine :O)

[glc]

The market is rapidly changing - post back when you are ready to do the build.

What do you want this machine to do?

Multiple monitors are not a fantasy now that we have Eyefinity.

[cantputt04]

Oh oops I forgot lol. This'll be a computer built primarily for gaming. Mainly all I'm looking for is maybe a general list of which hardware would give me the most for what I'm looking for, so this way when I get back and go to build in a few months I'll have an idea as to which direction I should be traveling in.

As for monitors, I was thinking like, a 27", then two 20" on either side. It would look siiiiiiiiiick. I think. This is also for fantasy purposes

[David M]

With your monitors and Eyefinity, get monitors of the same native resolution because Eyefinity will default to the monitor with the lowest resolution. If you have the choice, get the same monitor so you have the same image qualities on both monitors. I don't know if it is practical for you but three monitors is better, not only for the real estate (number of pixels) but because with three monitors you do not have a bezel running right down the middle of the screen which in a game is where you spend much of your time looking. It's a bummer to have what you are trying to shoot at hide behind a bezel or jump between bezels.


Thanks for serving this great country! Serve up some justice on the bad guys.

[glc]

The market is going to be very different in a few months with new GPU's and CPU's coming out.

Right now, the sweet spot is the i3/i5/i7 on a P55 chipset. By the time you are ready to build, Sandy Bridge may be out. ATI 6xxx and Nvidia 5xx are in the middle of a rollout.