Well fists off if you want a hardcore gaming rig ditch Intel and get an AMD64, I don't care what the intel guys tell ya benchmarks and user experience speak for themselves. 6800 Ultra is a good choice, its about 450$ now for AGP so its a great buy. I think you are misunderstanding the whole 4 gig of memory thing, what you are refering to is RAM wich deletes upon power loss, if it didint computer boot up would take abot 1 second. You will never use 4 gigs in ANY game EVER, waste of money plus it will cause data lag, a gig to a gig and a half is all you want really for games. Hard drive I suggest 1 74 Western Digi Raptor SATA drive. This is currently the top dog in performance sata wise, RAIDing them wont improve much, just more space.
Back to the processors I did post a summary on why AMD does perform better in games, if you are interested I will try to find it. If you have the bucks I suggest you got AMD64 FX-55, lower budget the best performing chips are AMD64 with either a Venice or San Diego core, but you dont get that option over at alienware so an AMD65 FX-55 of 3500-4000 will be an excelent chip. So to summarze (in terms with what you want....kinda) here is what I would get : 6800U, 1 Gig PC-3200 ram, AMD64 3500-4000 or FX-55, 1 or 2 WD Raptor hard disks. That will take you at the speed of light
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Intel i7 960 quad 3.2G LGA 1366, Asus P6X58D Premium, 750W Corsair, 6 gig 1600 DDR3, Spinpoint 1TB 720
