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CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Yorkfield 2.83Ghz
I checked out the i7′s as well, and while they seem to be a pretty significant upgrade over the Core 2 Duo I have now, most of the reviews I’ve read say they aren’t worth the price if you’ve got a faster quad core. I also don’t want to spend more than ~$200 for a processor, so this seems like good bang for the buck. It also has a 12mb cache.

RAM: G.Skill 4Gb DDR3 1333 (PC10666)
This is something I’m not entirely decided upon yet, but for a new system, I want at least 4Gb RAM. Most of the mobo’s I’ve looked at have 4 slots for RAM, so if I start with 4 and add 4 more later, I think that might be a good route to go. This G.Skill RAM is also the fastest one they have as far as latency is concerned. The features for this RAM makes it sound like it might not be compatible with anything but the i5 / i7 processors and P55 motherboards, but I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I’ll be keeping that in mind though, as I continue to work toward a final build for the new rig.

GPU: Diamond Radeon HD 4890 1Gb 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E 2.0 16x
Though i actually prefer nVidia cards, as they tend to be cheaper (and often more powerful), lately I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about the Radeon HD cards. A friend of mine recommended this card to me, and after reading reviews, I think this might be the one I want. Most everything I’ve read tip their hand to ATI for this generation of GPU’s, and having one that could be improved upon later by adding a second seems like a good idea this time around. I’d probably have to get a better power supply to do that, but that is way down the road, and just a matter of future-proofing the new computer so I don’t have to buy all news parts the next time one of them decides to go dead. I checked out the GeForce GTX line as well, but they seemed a little underpowered for the price. I really want to get a decent GPU without spending more than ~$200, and this one seems to fit the bill nicely. Of course, as with the other parts I mentioned above, this is all up in the air right now, and I’m going to mull over it for another day or so before I decide exactly what parts I’m going to get.

About the Xbox, I know it will be pretty barren once another Xbox comes out, but with Microsoft pouring a lot of work into Project Natal, which they have insisted is only going to be a peripheral for the current Xbox, I’m not too worried about it. When they do decide to release a new Xbox on the public, I’ll probably wait to see if, first, it looks like a good piece of hardware and will have good game support, and second, whether or not my friends are going to get one. I’ve had a lot of fun times with my current Xbox, but most of them have been because I’ve had a lot of friends to play games with on it. I’m confident that Microsoft won’t drop the ball with Xbox 3, but I don’t think we’ll see anything like that on the market before holiday season 2010.

Anyway, I’ll keep you guys updated on my system buying experience here… maybe once I get all the parts I’ll do a photo gallery of the assembly as well.