Building new comp.Follow

Ok, years ago I worked at Dell and was able to get one of their better (Back then at that time) XPS home systems. Now years later it has died. I'm shopping to either build or buy a good Gaming rig that will not cost me an Arm and a Leg! I'm looking for suggestions on what to get (If I build it) or what to buy (If I buy it built).

Agreed. The new socket 2011 "Sandy bridge" processors should drive the price of the existing socket 1366 Core i7's down to the point where they should be pretty reasonable. I still prefer Intel, Some people prefer AMD at the moment due to the lower cost. Asus for the motherboard either way, I tend to prefer Nvidia video cards, and the 580 GTX's that were just released are very very fast. ATI/ AMD also has some decent video cards, again usually somewhat cheaper. Look for a minimum 750 watt PSU on the theory you will want to try SLI or Crossfire at some point (dual video cards) or higher. Antec, Thermaltake, Enermax (my preference), Cooler master, or Corsair are all decent PSU manufacturers. Avoid Cool Max like the plague. Expect to spend around $75-$100 on a PSU, $150ish on the motherboard, and then the processor really depends on your budget with $150 being the low end, and $400 being the sweat spot. A really good gaming video card will be north of $450, decent mid range ones can be had around $200 easily. You could go with a Core i5 setup for $50 less on the processor and board each on average. The only downside there is you lose 2 ram slots and often some SLI/Crossfire bandwidth. It is a viable option though.

Hard drives, Solid states are still pretty high up in price, so a standard 7200 RPM rotational drive or maybe a 10,000 RPM Raptor from western digital might be a good way to go. Most of your asus motherboards have additional RAID capability, I usually recommend getting one fast OS drive and 2 slower but larger Data drives to run in Raid 1 (Mirrored) mode for backup purposes. Games and OS on the faster drive, things you care about and your OS drive backups on the raid 1 array, etc. A largeish raptor (200GBish)runs around $150. A pair of 750GB 7200 RPM drives runs $70 each.

Ram will be DDR3 ram, for 64 bit Windows 7, so 8-12 GB ram, fastest you can reasonably afford, faster and less with a plan to get more later being prefferable. The new Socket 1366 boards have 6 ram slots. The new Socket 2011 Sandy Bridge boards will have 8 ram slots. There are also no remaining reasons not to go with 64 bit, especially for gaming. (drivers are no longer an issue)

The Cooler Master CM 690 revision I and II cases are still the way to go for a cheap price, fully featured gaming case. If you don't like the look, there are plenty of other options. I haven't found as good an option for the $65 price they usually run though.

Optical drives are dirt cheap, get a SATA 24x DVD burner for $20, or spring for a blue ray burner for $100.

Before we go crazy speccing out a build, Whats your approximate budget and what are your preferences on processor and graphics card?

And Rosewell!