Roommate's buying a rig

pr0digal jenius

Well, my "4th roommate" (mom threw him out, so he lives on our couch, and his 'rent' is cooking and buying lots of drinks ) told me he wanted a badass machine for around $3000 including monitor.

And before you all tell me I'm crazy for these specs, keep in mind he wants it to plays new games, but it's also for school, and being an engineering major, that means Softworks, AutoCAD, etc, so without further adieu, let me hear yalls suggestions for how to improve this:

Black TT Tsunami Case w/ window
Black PLEXTOR DVD Burner Model PX-716AL/SW
WD Caviar 16MB Cache 400GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive
Logitech MX 5000 Black USB IR Wireless KB/Mouse (mx1000 mouse)
OCZ Gold Series 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 Unbuffered Dual Channel RAM
OCZ PowerStream OCZ520ADJSLI ATX, BTX, SATA, P4 and EPS12V 520W Power Supply
2x Intel Xeon EM64T 3.0 Irwindale 800MHz FSB Socket 604 Processor Model w/ HSF [Irwindale's are the 2MB L2 cache chips]
Iwill DN800-SLI Dual Socket 603/604 Intel E7525 ATX Server Motherboard [yes...that's a Xeon board with SLI ]
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic Sound Card
BFG Tech Geforce 7800GT 256MB GDDR3 Video Card

monitor & speakers are TBD, but most likely a 19" LCD [Samsung?] and a logitech surround setup...both @ employee pricing from best buy

Vikingod

The only thing, for AutoCAD and the like, I would say maybe go with a 10k RPM HD, maybe a couple of them in RAID. I have the 250mb version of the one above, and while its great, a 10k driver would be... greater(?). Hell for 3000 bucks, I'd buy for of the damn things, lol.

I would also say, get the Samsung 915n for an LCD, its a great monitor (maybe Im bias, but I love mine). Its great for games (8ms, no ghosting) and the prices is around $300.

pr0digal jenius

yea, I was looking at that one, actually

and the only thing with 10k hard drives, is they cost so much more, and with a 16MB cache, I doubt you'd notice much difference between 16mb @ 7200 and 8mb @ 10000. And as for RAID, maybe down the road, but for stability's sake, I think for him I'm gunna pass, otherwise i'd get the RAID edition fo that HD ($10 more, designed to work in RAID only, with many fail safes built in)

Vikingod

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/index.html

here is a pretty good comparison of 22 HD's, see gfor yourself.
The 10k drivers are expensive.

pr0digal jenius

he wants mroe space then raptor's are cost efficient for, I'm afraid, or I'd love to go that route

soloz2

You should take a look at an AMD board. The opterons are way faster and have more bandwith to communicate between the processors and memory. I don't really have experience with workstations but from what I've read and heard AMD pawns Intel