Build me an beast. Follow

I've found myself paid off for the semester, with no where to go because of a car accident I was in about a month ago. So with limited physical mobility and no car (and rather easy course load as I'm in that awkward transition phase from generalized classes to 400+ advanced and they are making me go back and take two classes every major must finish and both of them are jokes). Needless to say I'm gonna be near the computer a lot for the next year or so.

Anyways, Having decent insurance (both car and health) took care of things on that end, and due to a little luck, I have about $4000 extra after everything is squared away. At least 2k-3k of that I have put aside for a new computer tower. (I have a 30in. monitor and bose speakers already)

I've been researching CPUs, Graphics cards, extra fans, boards,case towers, RAM, thermal pastes, (almost?) everything to build my own rigg but I don't have any real experience in how it all comes together. So...

TLDNR : Recommend me a setup with something in the i7-950(or up) with either one or two graphics cards, that will pwn anything I throw at it and then some using 2k-3k dollars. 3k should be a hard cap, but you can squeek past it seeing as how I have a buyer for my old motorcycle, and if I put off ordering everything for a bit ill have even more income to throw at it.

Bonus if most of your recommendations can come from ecolleges i7 premade list.

I just saw the rumor about ATIs 6000 series dropping in october. If it does dual cards are the way to go.

Or maybe I snatch up a 6k and bask in the glow of envy.

I'd go with the build your own route, but if you must get one built thats not a bad price.

First off, assuming you have a .edu address, buy your windows OS here: http://www.microsoft.com/student/en/us/software/windows.aspx
Get teh 64 bit variant of Windows 7 Professional, also pick up the el cheapo Office 2010 while you are at it.

Next, the machine specifications:

3.33Ghz Intel Core i7-980X Extreme 12MB Cache Six-Core
Stock Intel LGA1156 Heatsink and Fan - Stock is fine unless you will be overclocking, and if you will be overclocking you want a full on water cooling setup
ASUS P6X58D-E (Intel X58, 3xPCI-E, 8xSATA2, 6xDDR3, 1394) (i'd be tempted to spend the Extra for the P6X58-D-Premium here actually, but that adds $100 to cost
6GB (2GBx3) Corsair XMS3 12800 DDR3 1600Mhz Memory Lifetime Warranty - Upgrade to 12GB when funds permit later.
80GB Intel X25-M SATA2 Solid State Disk Drive - OS and games here, all your data and whatnot to the 2GB drive.
2.0TB 7200RPM 32MB Cache Serial ATA300 (Major Brand)
22X LG SATA Lightscribe Dual Layer DVD±RW DVD-RAM w/Nero
1280MB GeForce GTX 470 GDDR5 PCI-E Dual-DVI (Major Brand) - Can't do the 480 and keep it near $3k with 2 of them
1280MB GeForce GTX 470 GDDR5 PCI-E Dual-DVI (Major Brand)
CoolerMaster Black HAF 932 (6 5.25, 6 3.5) 4 Fans, Audio/USB/1394 - See if they have the new Haf-X case available instead. Or the CM-690 Version 2.
1000watt Antec TruePower Quattro TPQ-1000
Onboard LAN included
Onboard Sound included
Internal All in 1 Card Reader
Wires and Cables neatly tied up away from fans
Standard 1 year parts and labor

3,074.00

Now if I were building this personally, I'd make some component changes that they don't offer. The Antec PSU's are decent, but for a machine of this horsepower level you would want to spend the extra and get an enermax PSU with a lifetime warranty.

The primary hard drive SSD is plenty fast, but for the cost, and considering it is a 3GB / sec hard drive when the specified motherboard will support 6GB / sec drives you might be better off just getting a 10,000 RPM SATA raptor drive and upgrading later.

If you decide to go water cooling, One of the Koolance systems is the way to go generally.

The processor, you could knock a bunch off the price and up the video cards if you went with a quad core with hyperthreading (8 total cores) instead of the hexacore processor (12 logical cores) but if I were building a new box, i'd want a hexacore in it. It probably would make sense to drop it to a quad though and maybe up the video cards to 480 GTX's