I just bought a Powerball ticket and I’m feeling lucky, so help me build the ultimate home computer. Case, cooling system, motherboard, type and amount of memory, video card(s), sound card, mouse, keyboard etc.
Rule #1. All parts must be real-no science fictional components.
Rule #B. All parts must be currently available to the general public.
Rule #Red. The parts must be compatible with each other.
Bonus points for giving total price of your dream machine.
Negative points for linking to someone else’s machine if it can be upgraded in any way. We are looking for a machine that cannot be currently upgraded at all.
Don’t forget the monitor(s).
Hello, is this monster cable? Yes I need some high performance keyboard cables, Wow only $200, what a deal!
And negative points for mentioning Monster anything. 
Are you limiting this to desktop or portables? My home computer was a VAX around 1990. Pretty awesome for a home computer, but it occupied a couple of full size racks (plus a bookcase to hold the paper documentation).
Unless you can come up with a portable computer that can best any home system out there…
Actually I meant desktop and portables. But are you allowing Enterprise Servers in the mix?
Home computer, singular, one box. Something that will kick the crap out of any game out there while running in hi-res on three screens.
Desktop.
The choices for a computer itself are hard because you can always hook up a bunch of components together to build your own supercomputer. However, a computer isn’t any good without some way to show what it is doing in style. You will want multiple monitors. Some configurations support up to six. My nomination is for just one of the six. Hook up one video connection to the biggest TV in the world, a 152 inch plasma by Panasonic for about $500,000 for game playing and movie editing.
Since I’m wanting a home computer, I’d like a monitor that would allow optimal viewing within my own living room, not the living room of my neighbor three doors down.
I started toying with the Alienware “build-a-system” tool for a bit to see what sorts of stuff’s available these days, and at what kind of inflated prices. I got the price up to about $8,200 before I lost interest. That was for a machine with a Core i7 990x six-core CPU overclocked to 4 GHz, 12 GB of DDR3 memory, two or three GDDR5 video cards, 2 TB of RAID storage, couple of optical drives…really, once you max the internals, the rest is just a matter of how much fluff you want to put on top, which won’t really affect performance much. TV tuner card? X-Fi Titanium audio card and a spiffy set of headphones? Sure, pile 'em on.
So far we have a joke mention of Monster cable, someone bringing up servers, another person mentioning a monitor that is too big for anyone’s living room, and a shout-out for Alienware’s configuration utility.
Anyone happen to have advice/opinions about the actual topic of this thread?
Well, help me out here. Your criterion says, “cannot be upgraded at all”. Does that mean that every slot and bay has to be filled? Every possible peripheral has to be added, gamepads, desktop rocket launchers, USB coffee mug warmers, everything? For that matter, do we have to add USB peripherals to the limit of the architecture, adding hubs until it fails and then backing off by one device?
Whatever specs you end up with, you should be able to add at least $5k to the price by hiring Datamancer to steampunkify your system. 
http://www.datamancer.net/
Let me help you out here: Quit overthinking this.
If you had a a few tens of thousands of dollars to blow on your dream system, and you wanted the best of the best, what would you get, component-wise?
I am definitely putting “The Marquis” at the top of my keyboard list-a true classic.
As a starting point, here’s the God Box, March 2011 version, from Ars Tech:
That’s the price from three months ago, it’d be slightly cheaper for some of those parts now.
They recommended the eVGA Geforce 580gtx - the 590gtx is out now, for either $750 or $900, depending on if the sale one is in stock (it’s not). So price for two of them would be $1500, not $1000 as figured in the above total.
I read the article, and i think that there were too many cases where they said they could have done more, but didn’t want to take it to extremes. For example, that motherboard can handle 96 gigs of memory, but they only put in 12.
I would probably just buy a Power 795 with 256 cores
That box will set you back $4.4million