I want a new PC and I want a good one. What I want is to play Half Life 3 or Doom 5 at maximum velocity. Please help me fritter away my money on something really cool. I’m not interested in wasting money on laser engraved solid gold cases, just the hardware inside. I could build the thing myself, but I’d much rather pay for someone else toi the hard work for me.
Thanks.
Check out www.alienware.com. Specifically their ALX series. Rigs start at like $5600.
::eek::
google “gaming PCs”. you’ll get a lot of websites that sell them and allow you to configure them to your tastes.
Most countries have at least a few retailers who will happily build you a top-of-the-line gaming rig in exchange for mucho dinero.
e.g. this quad-sli number from Scan.co.uk
Quad SLI is no viable at the moment. Most games will crash rather than take advantage of the 4 GPUS 
Do you really want to build your own PC? It can be a bit intimidating and could be frustrating (all it takes is one component to be fail and without proper trouble shooting skills and know-how you could be stuck) But it is a lot of fun! Specially for us computer geeks.
There are usually 2 main reasons why you’d want to build your own PC: 1 - You want a custom rig with strengths where they matter to you. 2 - You want to save money on a mid to high end rig over what you’d get with a retail company.
You’re rich though so you probably don’t care about number two. So make sure building your PC is something you think you’d have fun doing. If not go Falcon West or Alien ware. If so, have fun! I love building my own rigs, despite the occasional rustration, It’s really satisfying having put a custom rig together.
My suggestions: Go for an AM2 socket motherboard. The Nforce 500 Series would be the way to IMHO. Get the best AMD dual core CPU you can find on newegg and 2 gigs of fast DDR2 memory (a matched pair of 1 gig sticks).
Make sure the motherboard supports SLI at 16x in both ports. Get yourself a pair of Geforce7900 GTX’s and at least 2 hardrives. A fast one for the OS and games, and a secondary one for your mp3’s video, etc, files. Finally round it out with a bitching case (Thermaltakes are good) a good sound card and a nice set of 6.1 sorround speakers. Don’t forget the 21 or 24 inch widescreen LCD. You’ll have the horsepower to play anything at high resolutions 
2x Dual Core Xeon 3GHz
2x 512MB nVidia Quadro
4x 20" widescreen LCD
64GB DDR2 667MHz
3x 300GB SAS drives @10k RPM
1x 146GB SAS @ 15k RPM
DVD +/- RW
Floppy (natch)
64-bit XP or Redhat EL
$66,602
Well, you did say you’re rich…
WidowPC are recommended by the fanatical perfectionists at Penny Arcade. Widow PC will talk to you over the phone about exactly what you want to do with your machine and more or less customize the machine; you can also customize their stock setups over the web. They’ll assemble and test the rig themselves, including burn-in with 3DMark, DOOM3, and other CPU-intensive software. Their major selling points are customer service and a guarantee that you’ll be happy with the machine they build. Note that their current SLI systems are Socket 939 – you want to make sure that if you go AMD you get Socket AM2 (the new standard) so you can upgrade as AMD releases bigger bolder badass-er chips.
I would advise against buying a system right now, however, unless you really do have money to burn. CPU prices are still falling in the wake of Intel’s Conroe release, and are expected to keep dropping until mid-October. Intel’s Core2Duo is the baddest CPU in the valley right now, but AMD (generally the more upgrade-friendly manufacturer) had already released their AM2 parts which are already coming down in price to compete with the Intel chips. If you wait until October I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much more you can get for your money.
Go to Voodoo pc’s and ‘build’ your own. I just ‘built’ one that started out at $6,000 and upgraded it to a $20,000 machine. Prolly the best package you can buy. I’d like to see a comparison between top-end Alienware and Voodoo machines if it’s out there.
blackrabbit,
$49,000 for RAM seems a bit much. :dubious: 
whoops, link for Voodoopc.com .
Have fun!
I use Ars Technica as a guide everytime I build a new computer.
Alienware was my first thought, but I’ve heard some bad things about thier build quality recently 
I’m still trying to figure out what the heck Dell is offering that for. It’s overkill for everything except maybe things like animation rendering and molecular modeling.
Tom’s Hardware came close to what you want.
I’d go with Falcon Northwest or Voodoo before Alienware, and any one of those three before any other company. That is not just because Alienware is owned by Dell; it would have been that way before Dell purchased Alienware. These three firms are the mainstays of the high-performance gaming PC niche. Voodoo PC is reknowned for it’s clean, neat, intricate wiring.
Definitely go with a water-cooled set-up. Dual 24" wide screen LCD monitors would be really nice (the Dell monitors are generally considered among the best, and reasonably priced for a high-end 24" monitor). If you go dual videocard, definitely go nVidia; if not, you can choose ATI, whose dual VC setup sucks, but is currently the single card champ (but not by much, and that will likely change next time one of the firms updates their line).
It’s easy to spend $6,000 - $10,000 or more on a gaming PC. IMNSHO, that’s like buying a Ferrari to cruise around Manhattan - a waste. After a certain point, the gains are no longer worth the cost. $2,000 - $2,500 can buy a PC that would be the envy of most geeks, and you could upgrade to the latest/greatest semiannually.