$2500 Build for friend

[Dark_Eternal]

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Gaming and other basic PC activities.
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
$2500 Total including tax and shipping.
3) Where do you live?
Oklahoma
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. Please be very specific.
He needs everything but keyboard and mouse.
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Only keyboard and mouse will be reused.
6) Will you be overclocking?
Yes.
7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?
Probably looking at the 23-27" range.
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
Buying the parts over the next month or two.
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc.
Crossfire in the case of dual Radeon cards.
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If so, what OS? 32bit or 64bit?
A valid Windows 7 license has already been procured.

 

[NoForgiveness]

Wow with 2500 beans you could build a dream rig with SSDs in RAID0 and 5870s in XFire. Excuse me while I go drool for a while. I won't even get into building up an example from Newegg--Just go and pick the most expensive CPU, most expensive motherboard, etc, and you'll have your system

 

[drescherjm]

Newegg--Just go and pick the most expensive CPU, most expensive motherboard, etc, and you'll have your system

The funny thing is even picking the most expensive components it will not be easy to spend $2500 US that is if you build it yourself. I guess if you buy the $1000 CPU that would be a great start. I would wait for intel 6 core for that.

Now if you buy from dell, HP ... you can easily spend 2 times that to get a system with the same highest end parts. I know this because I (not having time at work to build myself) ordered a few systems in the last month from these and I was shocked to see high end priced systems with 350W power supplies, low end motherboards. I guess that was HPs game. For dell the systems came with the absolute minimum RAM and disk but when you wanted to upgrade the 80GB drive (does anyone make these anymore?) to a 1TB drive that was $350 more. WTF? And memory was no better. An i7 920 system came with 1GB of ram and to upgrade to 12GB it cost over $800 US.

[EDIT]I see how easy that was. Sorry for the noise.[/EDIT]

 

[Jospeh]

What about going for a 30" monitor?

 

[Zepher]

The funny thing is even picking the most expensive components it will not be easy to spend $2500 US that is if you build it yourself. If you buy from dell, HP ... you can easily spend 2 times that to get a system with the same highest end parts.

$2500 is easy to spend picking the most expensive parts.
$1000 for proc
$600 for mobo
$500 for 1 video card
$800 for a case
$400 for ram
$1400 for 2 SSD's
$1200 for monitor

 

[NoForgiveness]

2518 after shipping:

 

[lt_shiro]

I would get Dell UltraSharp 2209WA in place of the P2370HD.

 

[NoForgiveness]

I myself prefer just whatever cheap monitor I can get, but I always recommend Samsungs because everyone seems to want them.

Here's an alternate route for under 2500 shipped, more guts, less beauty:

 

[Shadowssong]

Paying $209 for a motherboard but paying $230 for ram? Negatron! Get a nicer motherboard and drop the ram to some G.Skill DDR3-1600 for half the price. Never start with crossfire on a new build, get a single 5870 or even a single 5970, that way you can crossfire in the future.

 

[tiraides]

It's best to view CrossFire as an all-or-nothing solution, as the majority of people here who say that they plan on using CF (or SLI) in the future never do. That said, the HD5850 or HD5870 are very good cards on their own even at a 1920x1080 (or 1900x1200) resolution.

Expensive RAM like the Corsair Dominators are overrated, especially if you aren't planning a heavy overclock of the processor (to, say, beyond 4GHz). Stick with the cheaper RAM kits, and make sure that they run at 1.5V.

Dark_Eternal, outside of the questions, is there anything that your friend prefers?