Enter the college student:
Doom III: looks very nice, way fun to play with surround sound in the dark and a nice big moniter (like my 19" flat screen)
Half Life 2: must have, plus CS Source
Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers: looks like a great sequel to the first
Quake 4: looks very promising
Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War: Winter Assault: for you RTS folks out there like myself (i'm still hooked on C&C: Tiberian sun and Total Annihilation)

gamespy.com is best choice for your gaming needs
or ign.com

I think I have to change my panties.

I'm guessing that card costs about half of what I paid for my entire system.

It's not that bad, I only paid $300 for it.

The trick is to buy a second one down the road for some SLI goodness.

It's funny you brought this up. I'm planning my next machine and I'm getting 2 of the BFG GeForce 7800 GTX PCI Express (256MB) cards, already overclocked to use in SLi mode on the Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI motherboard. I'm going to use a AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (San Diego Core) or an FX-57 if the price drops. Then I'm going to use 4 GB of Dual Channel PC400 RAM, For storage, I'm going with a pair of Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Buffer Drives.

I'm still deciding on which case and other parts I'm going to use. I'm thinking about the CM Stacker 830. As far as the DVD/CD burners go, I'll most likely use Lite-On because in my experience, they almost never go bad, they've got the buffer underrun protection on them, and they are very quick.

This system won't be cheap, but I won't need to upgrade for awhile. The video cards alone are going to cost me $1000. When it's all said and done, it's going to cost me over $3k, especially when you add in the 24" widescreen flat panel monitor and a legal copy of WinXP64.

This thing is going to rock, and it will last because everything is expandable, and even the case can switch to the BTX motherboard.

Notepad is positively going to SMOKE on that system!

OMG!!! I hadn't even thought of that. Here I was thinking about Doom3, World of WarCraft, Video Editing, being an MP3 server, etc. but didn't even consider notepad!!! Man, I bet I can play solitaire faster than anyone else on earth!

You were only going to watch porn and you know it.

How's the wife?

I think you'll find the reviews lean more towards the FX-57 because the 55 seems a bit anemic in comparison to the 57 or many of the dual-core processors,t he dual-core processors seem to be a good choice as well unless you are focusing on gaming. Multimedia applications seem to favor the dual-core.

Also, WinXP64 is said to have some driver availability issues. The only current advantage to it is the ability to address 64 bit applications down the road and access to over 4 GB of RAM, until games are 64 bit it's best to stick with 'vanilla' XP.

I finally got the cable hooked up to the new machine yesterday. High gee-whiz factor, here. I can use the 'puter as a DVR, and watch tv in an inset on my computer if I wish.

I haven't delved into the docs yet, but I'm wondering if I will be able to burn off what I record onto DVD. Does anyone know if this is possible, or is MS's commitment to preserving copyright going to prevent this?

Are you asking "How do you save Windows Media Player streaming content?"?

I'm mainly interested in WinXP64 because it's designed to take advantage of the AMD 64 bit processor instruction set. This alone will provide a significant performance increase, especially when it comes to high end graphics software. I also anticipate many new programs to be developed with the 64 bit/multi-core processors in mind.

I was considering going with the FX-57 or going multi-core too (the motherboard can do both), but right now it's $200 more for 200 Mhz. I'm not convinced it's worth it.

Nah...I've got stuff to do that. What I'm wondering is how I can burn to DVD things which I've recorded onto my hard drive with Windows Media Center from the cable tv attachment.

Go to Tom's Hardware and read the article about the current releases of x64.

You might be surprised.

Interesting article. The performance is pretty much identical when it comes to 32 bit aps. I hadn't really considered the fact that the new OS will have to TWUNK with a new version of WOW. Because a translation is necessary, I can actually envision cases where Win2k64 would be slower. It's like trying to run Windows software on a Mac or Linux box. You'll take a performance hit because before something can be run, it will have to go through a translation process.

I think I was right about a performance increase, but you were right in that it wouldn't matter with 32-bit apps. It won't be worth the expense until we have more 64-bit apps. But if I install it now, when those apps come out, I'll already be ready.

The price is the same for either version of XP so right now it's a toss up. Do I want to get pretty much the exact same performance but have less choice in drivers? Or do I want to forgo the drivers in favor of being ready to take advantage of the forthcoming 64-bit apps?