i7 Gaming Rig

[JMCD]

Building this for an American friend when I go see him next month.

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. That means what types of tasks you'll be performing.
Games, browsing. L4d is what he currently plays as well as waiting for Diablo III

2. What YOUR budget is. A price range is acceptable as long as it's not more than a 20% spread
~1100 USD

3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from.
USA

4. IF YOU have a brand preference. That means, are you an Intel-Fanboy, AMD-Fanboy, ATI-Fanboy, nVidia-Fanboy, Seagate-Fanboy, WD-Fanboy, etc, etc, etc, you get the picture.
Likely no preference, but i7.

5. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are.
Negative.

6. IF YOU have searched and/or read similar threads.
Nope.

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.
Nothing major if at all, he's never done it and doesn't seem too interested. Perhaps I will do it for him and clock it up to 3.6 or so.

8. WHEN do you plan to build it?
Building it at the very end of July, but would like to have all the parts there well before to avoid any problems. To be safe, July 15th.


Quick question, NCIXUS avoids border charges going into the states correct? Basically what I had in mind for this rig was a single video card for now, but a motherboard compatible with sli/crossfire (whichever route we go) so there is room for upgrade down the road. 6 gigs of DDR3 and WD Black 640gb likely.

[Chris]

There are many threads here on i7 build recently with different price range. For myself, I built the lowest cost i7 since I am not a great gamer, but I do oc to 3.8GHz or 4 GHz. My sig has most of the hardware listed.
You can upgrade the video card to get better gaming experience, and also the psu to Tx750W

[JMCD]

That's generally what he would be going for, probably a GTX 275. All I want to make sure of is having an SLI capable motherboard. How's the EVGA LE? I haven't read much about it. SLI mobo would be a plus as he will probably buy a second card down the road.

[upsidedown]

IIRC the LE has the PCI-E slots locked to 16x 8x 8x 4x or something like that, so if you decide to go SLI later down the road the second card would be running on a 8x PCI-E slot.

I'd say go for gigabyte UD4 or P6T-SE for a 'budget' mobo

[JMCD]

Originally Posted by upsidedown

IIRC the LE has the PCI-E slots locked to 16x 8x 8x 4x or something like that, so if you decide to go SLI later down the road the second card would be running on a 8x PCI-E slot.

I'd say go for gigabyte UD4 or P6T-SE for a 'budget' mobo

Newegg.ca - GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards

Looks like a decent board. Probably the cheapest one as well. Thanks. Other than that I just need to look for some decent memory and wait for some sales.

[Chris]

Yes, this is my board, so is many others here. It can overclock easily (I mean the bios is well organized). It does not have onboard buttons for power on, reset, clear cmos. But, so far, I did not need those buttons, so it is not a loss.