Building a new system...feedback needed please.

[KillCapitalism]

Alright, here's the deal. My old system is tired/outdated and will not play the newest games, so I guess it's time to build a new one. The games I'm most interested in are Crysis and Call of Duty 4. I was wondering if the following hardware would be fine to run these games. I'm on a max. budget of $1,500 here, so I'm going with an AMD-based system instead of Intel.

Proposed build:

CPU: AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+
Motherboard: MSI K9A2 Platinum
RAM: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2X1GB DDR2 800
HD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA 3.0
Video: EVGA GeForce8800GTS 512MB
Opt. Drive 1: Sony 16X DVD-ROM
Opt. Drive 2: Samsung 20X DVD+-R
PS: Corsair 520W
Case: Undecided
Sound: SB Audigy 2 PCI
OS: XP Home


Hopefully this will be a major performance boost over what I have now:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP2800+
Motherboard: Asus A7N8X 2.0
RAM: Corsair 2X512MB PC3200DDR
HD: Western Digital RaptorX 150GB (Going to be sold to a friend)
Video: ATi Radeon X850Pro AGP8X

[landdaddy]

1. Some very good HW choices IMO

but the 6000+ multiplier will not run the RAM at rated speed unless you fiddle around in the BIOS and slightly overclock it. You may want to consider the 6400+ if you are not comfortable playing around with your BIOS settings. The 6400+ does not include a HSF so that would be another thing to consider.
Don't know about the K9A's but the K9N would be good choice. Personally, I would look at the Asus or Gigabyte boards.
Just wanted to say that the games you mentioned played very well on my 6000+ and a lesser 8600GTX vid card. COD4 at high settings and Crysis at medium settings.
Also want to say that going from a 32 bit cpu to a 64 bit gave me a major performance boost but from a 64 bit single core to a two core not so much.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. Save some money.

I have the 8800 GT here and it really is amazing. Worth what it costs and generally is less than the GTS.

Also, both G. Skill and Patriot RAM can also save you some money.

I also like Samsung drives very, very much. They are bulletproof and fast.

For processor, I second the 6400+. Worth the small, extra investment. Match it with a Freezer 64 HSF and you are good to go.

[Occulus]

3. KillCapitalism could also go with a NV8500GT 512 x2

Run them in SLI mode. It's a DX10 card, with 512M of RAM. S/he should be able to play Crysis on high/very high with two video cards (and no, you really don't need Vi$ta to get the "DX10" very high settings from Crysis). The 8500GTs are dropping in price, but are still decent cards, and two of them at once would probably make the games s/he mentioned just scream.

I want the machine s/he's building. Badly.

[KillCapitalism]

4. Thanks for the suggestions.

I will ponder the 6400+, but what heatsinks are good for it? Zalman? Coolermaster? Thermaltake?

I've priced it all up & I can get all the components I need for a bit under my $1,500 limit. I may consider a different GeForce 8XXX card, but I just want to run a single card...SLI configs tend to gobble up a lot of power. I'm gonna go back to Tom's Hardware.com and review some more video benchmarks and try to make a final decision sometime soon. Thanks everyone.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. Here you go:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835185125

Installs hella easy and cools hella good. The price is right, too. VERY quiet to boot.

[landdaddy]

7. I'll second what T_S recomends

for a HSF. I've been using an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 on single core and dual core for several years.

[Deja Q]

6. The 6000 is a plus, but go Intel:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=921&model2=871&chart=422

Check the specs in red and compare other CPUs too.