Thanks. Yeah I´ve been builing comps or modding em since 87-88 and its still something that I do occasionally. This one will be a multimedia/gaming machine hence the large gfx card planned for it. I also game at hi- res (1920*1200) so a powerfull graphics card is a must. For your needs this is pretty much overkill. But hardware is cheap these days.

Actually you can to some degree. Ram is the same so its just to purchase and replace. Same for HDDs, just to buy one, or better yet get an external one. Switching processors is trickier but doable. No GFX change unless its a workstation class Mac.

But buying/building a custom machine is pretty much a no go today (with exeptions). This isn´t 1998 with lots of Mac builing companies to choose from, Steve Jobs pretty much killed that off. No a Mac is a one package deal. But moddable since its all standard PC parts today.

What OS will you be running on this? Hopefully a 64bit OS, hate to think you're wasting all that memory on 32bit XP

I wouldn´t dream of using a 10 GB rig (8 GB ram and 2 GB gfx) running a 32 bit OS! :)

Nah I´ll stick to using Vista 64 Business since after SP1 its a pretty solid OS. I usually mod my games alot so lots of mem is a must. Some mods for games now requires 4 GB or even more minimum even to run. I got the mem for 1580 SEK and since going 4 GB costed 1088 SEK I figured is was worth the additional cash. Too many times of sitting there thinking "I don´t need more" and later on saying "wish I had more".

Well a number of people don't realize that the 32 bit OS cannot handle more than 4GB of memory because of memory addressing limits. So when I hear people suggesting that they will be updating, I try to point out there are limitations to hardware.

The joke to me is how much of a resource hog Vista can be. To the point where I'd estimate Vista has 4:1 ratio of memory usage (at least in the home edition). I would hope the Business edition doesn't consume as much memory in system resources (one would hope anyway). The more Vista attempts to resemble Macintosh, the more I lean toward Unix / Linux. Not because it's "pretty" but because Microsoft's business practice seems to be more for the sake of rolling out a new OS than a functional one. But then I ran Beta 3 and RC1 (Release Copy) of Vista. The crashes and terrible behavior turned my off to it (Anytime you crash loading File Explorer, there are problems). Especially when the release copy was still acting like a Beta product.

But I will give it credit for certain features. Unfortunately I cannot think of a single one. So good luck in your experience.

Mm, Good choice of hardware. 790GX chipset and a Phenom go nicely together :) When you choose your Radeon video card, make sure it has a decent cooling system on it. The 4000 series of cards run fairly hot and you don't want all that heat blowing around inside your case. I recently got a 4850 with decent dual slot cooling solution from HIS. Pretty good buy so far :)

I am running Vista Ultimate 64 on my machine and so far I like it. Took a bit of tweaking to optimize it. By default it schedules hard disk defrags and windows defender system scans on an annoyingly frequent basis but once you turn those and a few other automated tasks the system runs quite nicely :)

Vista seems to have gained a rather bad reputation it doesn't deserve. People tend to forget that XP was even worse when it first came out. I remember trying to get it running on a Pentium 233 with 32 megs of ram and running into the most horrible bugs and problems imaginable :P

are you planning to go to SL or WoW?

None of em. They simply would steal too much time if I got into em so I don´t do much MMOs. But all the other games I run would benefit from this new rig. And I intend to do alot of virtualization so lots of mem/cores is needed. Its more of a "throw anything at it" machine.

i was only asking

Its cool. IM not much of an online gamer to tell the truth since the good ol Unreal Tournament days.

damn but gaming PC is going to be a beast of a machine

Thanks. Im more of calling it an economically reasonable gaming machine.