The guys in my clan mostly have Q6600 & 8800GTX systems that load up pretty quick with very low pings. I know it doesn't fully matter what you have for gear but it helps. I plan to at least go quad core & at minimum 8800GTS. Any other suggestions to add to those? Would like to go 4gigs of ram also.

Given more than a year of Nvidia refusing to acknowledge and fix the issues with the G80 and a certain popular game engine on a certain popular OS, I vote ATI 3870. Pretty bad when a 5 year old game is COMPLETELY unplayable on the fastest card out there. (Yes I'm bitter )

And let's not forget Nvidia's flickering textures in BF2...

I agree Doc . I went with the Q6600 and HD3870 no regrets here . The price is right and no complaints with frame rates in games for a fraction of the price .

So here are some parts I have decided to go with for a fast budget system. I might spend the extra money & get a 150Gig Raptor though instead.

ASUS P5N-T Deluxe 780I SLI LGA775 ATX DDR2 3PCI-E16 2PCI-E1 1PCI GBLAN Motherboard

PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad 750W ATX V2.2 EPS12V 24PIN SLI Active PFC Power Supply Black

G.SKILL F2-8000CL5D-4GBPQ PC2-8000 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-1000 CL5-5-5-15 240PIN Dual Channel Memory Kit

EVGA E-GEFORCE 8800GT 600MHZ 512MB 1.8GHZ DDR3 PCI-E Dual DVI-I HDTV Out Video Card

Intel Xeon E3110 Dual Core Processor LGA775 3.0GHZ Wolfdale 1333FSB 6MB Retail

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 3.5IN 500GB SATA2 8.5MS 7200RPM 32MB Cache NCQ Hard Drive

Logitech G15 2ND Gen Gaming Keyboard USB Black Silver Amber LCD Panel Programmable Backlit Keys

Logitech G5 Laser Gaming Mouse 2000DPI USB BLUE/BLACK

NZXT Duet HTPC / Tower ATX Case Silver Black 2X5.25 1X3.5 3X3.5INT No PS Front USB Firewire & Audio(for my current system)

your in for a treat, i just got my e3110 running at 4.24ghz on air.

Heheheh sweeeeeet!!!

What board are you running?

Asus P5k

dont say that i havent had a problem in almost 3 weeks now. yer gonna jinx me ya bastid. lol