Finally went all out.
 

This whole thing started as a "Under $500 upgrade", and ballooned to a $1,200 shopping spree.


(sorry for shitty cell phone pic)

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
ATI Radeon HD4870
4gb RAM
Antec Twelve Hundred case.
WD Cavair 1tb drive.
OCZ Vendetta 2 heatsink.
Xigmatek PSU.
Gigabyte mobo.

Too tired to build it now. Drove to a Microcenter that was 3 hours from my house to get the gear I didn't buy from NewEgg. And the weather was awful today, so.

I'm excited though. Often times, building the new rig is 90% of the fun. So, I'm gonna hold off til tomorrow to build it.

You will be pleased. Might I recommend Vista x64, in order to get use out of the 4GB of ram? I'm holding off still and running Vista & XP 32-bit, but even with only actually using 3GB my new build hauls ass.

I was going to go with XP x64 at first, and if driver support sucked total ass, then I was going to consider Vista.

Yeah, from what I understand Vista x64 has better support than xp64, though I personally haven't tried vistax64 at all yet, so let me know, I'm more curious of the gaming aspect of course..

Haven't loaded an OS yet, but I did get it OC'd to 3ghz. I'll definitely take it higher than that.

Nice... I haven't OC'd mine, got rid of that habit a while ago. I'm at the point where any major upgrade I do needs to last me a good 2+ years.