New rig maybe

[Wizrdwarts]

I might be getting a new computer soon, building it ourselves. We've decided on these to start with, these aren't set in stone yet so any recommendations would be nice:

Intel E6850 Core 2 Duo
Asus Maximus Formula SE motherboard
2 GB PC6400 RAM (also a quick question, should I beware of those cheap rams they have on sale at Fry's? One goes for 35 for 2 gigs)
Nvida 8800GT (not sure which maker)

Also how much power will this take up? would 500 watts be enough or would more be better?

[ManGuy]

Everything looks good, the GT requires 400 watts so I think that 500 will be good, I would go with something a little above to be on the safe side. The motherboard is good, but you might want to look at the 680i. It's a lot cheaper and you can use the money you saved on some nice Corsair RAM.(Try to get the more expensive things when it comes to RAM, just a suggestion.) And I recommend Evga for the brand of Graphics card so that you could take advantage of the Step-Up program if you wanted. Hope that helped.

[Scinto]

go for the Q6600 if your considering to get the E6850 they're the same price beit a pound or so,

Corsair Value ram is pretty good stuff,

500/600w should be more than enough

[Wizrdwarts]

Thanks everyone, and do most games support quad cores or will they be wasted?

[ManGuy]

I'm not sure about quad cores, but most games are now moving dual-core so... But having 4 cores running 2.4GHz is most likely better than 2 cores running at 3GHz.

[Scinto]

In depth view of both CPU's
http://xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/dis...d-q6600_8.html

[camper.]

Get a quad, it does make a difference, a ridiculously large difference. The cache alone usually boosts performance a good 5-15%. An overclocked quad core would be ideal. Windows is pretty smart in handling multiple CPUs, and your processing power will not be wasted. I don't think you'll be seeing much improvement in BF2, but in every neew game (Episode 2, Crysis, etc), you'll see boosts. As for pre-Q3/2007 games, you can run as many background tasks as you like, and provided you have the right RAM, it shouldn't make any difference whatsoever (as long as they don't affect disk access).

[looqas]

My advice would be to get E6850 if you don't know how to overclock and Q6600 if you do. Not too many games out there will yet benefit from having 4 cores over 2.

As a PSU I would get 600W minimum since it's not very likely you'll be upgrading it any soon in the future either. This way paying a little extra you'll hopefully avoid having to replace that longer.