A tad bit too expensive for me, but the big bottlneck is the single 5970, that CPU will be strolling along or using only 4 cores waiting for the GPU to hurry up and feed it some data.
Amith12
That CPU is going to be using only 4 cores most of the time period. Unless OP also has a big habit of video editing, encoding, DVD ripping, etc. then there's really nothing out there that's going to use his 6 cores. Only recently have we seen most newly released games start to recommend a quad-core CPU and those CPUs have been out for how long now? We probably won't see six cores being a useful upgrade for about another 1.5-2 years and by that time the i7-980 is going to be outdated. Right now the only thing that warrants buying the 980 is if you have a ton of money to get rid of and want bragging rights.
OP, just save yourself $800 and get an i7-930 (easily overclocked to 4 Ghz) or maybe an i7-975 if you want an unlocked multiplyer.
Also, two 5970s is total overkill and a waste of money. It would be a reasonable investment if you were planning on gaming on a 3x 1920x1200 eyefinity setup or something, but if you're only using a single 1920x1200 monitor then one 5970 is going to pretty much max out everything you throw at it with plenty of FPS to spare.
Finally, get rid of those 6 GB/s drives (from what I've heard they're not much of an improvement over 3GB/s drives). Then use all the money you just saved yourself and get some SSDs to put in RAID 0 (for your OS and programs) along with a 1-2TB 7200 RPM 3GB/s drive for storage.
As someone else already said, going to balls to the walls when building a rig is stupid unless you're rich. The rig may be pure win for the first half year or so that you own it but then newer hardware is going to come out and suddenly you aren't king of the hill anymore. Then after a couple of years your rig is just average (if even that) and you need to upgrade again to get back to where you used to be. If you want to play your games maxed out then get only the hardware that you need to max out your games and nothing more. Then take the money you saved and keep saving it so that you can afford to upgrade it to nice parts in the future.
I can tell you right now that the upgrade path you're looking at taking right now with the components everyone has told you to buy will be that you'll want to pick up a second 5970 for crossfire in the far future when they're cheap so that you get a very handsome power boost without breaking the bank for whatever the latest and greatest GPU happens to be at that time. Then in a few years you'll probably need to upgrade the i7 to a six-core CPU (but this doesn't mean go get that 980, it's going to be slow compared to other six cores by the time they start becoming useful for gaming).
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