Build your dream PC...money no object.

[Fat Tone]

Seriously. A colleague has commission a PC (not from me sadly) with effectively no budget restriction whatsoever.

He doesn't want lots of large screens, but otherwise the sky is the limit.

What would be your choices?

Damn I wish I was building this! :drool:

[Sasq]

see here

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=62251

[Fat Tone]

Hehe, I did think of that but space is a little restricted

Let's put a ceiling on this of £20,000. Seriously.

[schmosef]

something with two quad core xeon 5300 series cpus.

maybe start with an HP workstation and build it up from there.

don't forget the seagate cheetah 15k rpm hard drives.

lots of ram.

[az]

What for?

And I certainly would get a card that can do high-res output, then a Matrox TripleHead2Go (digital) and three projectors.

And I'd spend a lot of money on getting the machine to be virtually silent.

[Fat Tone]

Office work for him, gaming for the kids, not to take up excessive space. I couldn't even persuade him that a 30" LCD would be good.

He just has a stupid amount of money to blow.

[Fat Tone]

If it were for me, then I'm with you all the way Az

[schmosef]

does it have to be one pc? why not get something simple for him and something fancy (or maybe just all the various games consoles) for the kids?

[Fat Tone]

Lets not rationalise this. Lets just throw money at one PC. This wants to be the fastest, most future-proofed, capable, highly specified home machine money can buy.

[Sasq]

Lets not rationalise this. Lets just throw money at one PC. This wants to be the fastest, most future-proofed, capable, highly specified home machine money can buy.

so it will 48 hours, instead of 24 before its outdated then?

[Wulfman]

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200706.ars/4

otherwise, I'm with schmoself: get him a silent, fanless, ssd-equipped office machine, and something for his kids to play on.

mfg
wulfman

PS.: futureproof? *laughing* are you sure you want to be the one to tell him that his kids can't play current games anymore within 2 years?

[ZokesPro]

My dream system would have at least:

2 quad cores
32 to 64gb ram
12 SSD's
A kick ass raid card
A DX10 gfx card

I can live with one graphics card, it wouldn't be a gamers system, although with one gfx card, it would still kick ass.

[Admiral]

Personally I'd settle for:

-1 quad core
-4gb ram
-8800gtx SLI or hd2900XT CF (though I'm not too fond of dual card setups)
-2 or 3 SSD drives (one for games, one for XP, one for Vista)
-2x 1TB RAID 1 array for storage (or RAID 0 for safety)
-1KW PSU
As light a case as possible, the Antec P160 aluminum case I have is still good though it could use more airflow. The P182 or P190 (PSU's included for the latter, one 160W for mobo, one 550 for the rest ) have better airflow and I like the cable routing on them, but they're heavy. I also like the Spire Pininfarina.
-3 21" LCD monitors with a Matrox TripleHead2Go.
-sound card, speakers and peripherals of your liking

[Mehen]

QX6700 QuadCore
Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme w/ 120mm fan
2x 8800GTX
4GB RAM DDR2
ASUS Striker Extreme Nforce 680I
WD Raptor 150GB (as many as needed)
Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W
Lian Li PC-V2000BPLUSII -OR- Silverstone Temjin TJ07 -OR - LL or Sstone w/ a door
Some $200 creative soundcard

Maybe a BluRay drive?

TripleHead2Go (DVI) w/ 3xlarge Dell Monitors or 3x Samsung 226BW or something.

*just noticed the doesn't want a lot of large screens bit - a single 226BW would be nice.

*another note; this is a sane config, with the V8 Xeon (which is out right now) I could go much higher. Or with 8800Ultra instead of GTX, but there little point. Just get an OC version of the GTX.

edit: HD2900XT is a viable option, it has improved a lot as of late. I think an even better option right now would be to spend a little and get a single 8800GTS 320mb and maybe wait for the R650. (and switch to a Crossfire board as well...)

[Jammrock]

Last time I did this the system would have cost $9500 USD. Though if you go on to VoodooPC, Falcon NW, and Alienware you can go even higher. I think Falcon has a near $20k config. Though if money was no object and I could wait, I'd wait for both the AMD 4x4 and Intel V8 platforms to come out with Phenom FX and the "Penryn" Extreme CPU and get the better of the two with dual video cards and 8 GB of RAM (or 16 GB if the mobo supported it).

Though a massive system like that would have to be custom water cooled.