Lords of Death Forums Lords of Death Forums LoD General Discussion What Gaming PC you running?

Hey, for those of you running med-to-high-end gaming PC's (~$3000), what company do you recommend?
I've always hand-built my own computers, since I was in 8th grade and built my first pentium mmx 166 system (good times)... but now that I'm making decent money as an adult and am sick of fixing shit all the time, I'm ready to buy a prebuilt PC with a warrenty. I'm of course looking at the big dogs, Alienware and Dell XPS systems... any others out there that anyone would recommend? Thanks

check out
http://www.falcon-nw.com/
never owned one of their computers but they get really good ratings.
lol check out
http://www.falcon-nw.com/config/build.asp

Faclon-NW is top tier. So is http://www.voodoopc.com/
These 2 companies offer expensive rigs, but they are by far the best in the industry as far as quality, performance and attention to detail. They are expensive, but you get what you pay for.

At the end of the day, I just don't see paying Alienware or Falcon the $$$ when I can build what they build. My current system I built about 9 months back:
Antec 900 case
Thermaltake 650W modular power supply
NVidia 680 SLI main board
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS video w/ 320 MB RAM
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.33 GHz
2 GB of Corcair Dominator DDR2 memory
Toss in 2 x DVD R/W and 4 x 300 GB SATA2 drives in a raid 0+1 configuration and *bam* you have a gaming platform.
I figure this system will be good for another year to two and then it will be upgrade time again. For myself, though I can spend the $$ at an outfit like Alienware, I just don't see the value. After I built mine, I compared as close as I could with major manufacturers. I saved $600 as compared to a comparable Dell XPS and $750+ on a comparable Falcon. Plus I enjoy the "did it myself" feeling.
But whether you build your own or not, 2 months later a bunch of new crap ships that beats the crap you bought. Seemed as soon as I finished buildnig mine NVidia shipped the 700 series board, the quad core shipped, as did DDR3, etc.
Nature of the beast.
Moose

agree. I build my own every time and while there may be some hassles it saves a lot of money so it's worth it.
Aren't the new chips supposed to be released in a couple months? May be worth waiting for the deals on current top of the line ones.

Clearly building your own PC is a great choice for your wallet. I would certainly though go with some WD Raptor 10k rpm drives in raid0 (although they're pricey, 150GB for $200), and if you backup, I find raid0+1 to be unnecessary and weighty. Your call of course.
I went crossfire ATI, and in the end wish I would have gone nvidia, clearly you're making a good choice.

of course knowing what your computer needs are is probably the most important thing as well. If it's not rendering/cpu crunch muscle probably best to just go with some quad cores <img src="/~stretch/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

286 (overclocked to 14 mhz), 2 meg ram. EGA video card. Sound blaster 8 bit card. 2 mhz BNC network card. 14.4 modem.
My shit changes all the time.

lol. I think I had a tandy 1000 that was those specs... I think it had a 16 meg hard drive too

*NT*