Make the perfect gaming pc

Here at 22tech, we love the idea of making your own pc's. Why? Because they provide a great amount of customization for a REALLY cheap price! But how can you get the perfect best gaming setup?? Here is our parts list for a $900 beauty, and all parts are from Newegg!

1. CPU - Obviously, you need a core 2 duo, but which one? You can get the pentium dual cores that OC very easily, you can get the e4xxx series, or you can get the more expensive e6xxx series. For our purposes, we picked up a e6, it is the lowest e6xxx series with 4mb of cache. It is not that overclockable, but you could easily get it to 3-3.5 GHz.
2. Motherboard - For the motherboard you really need a p35 chipset, it is a midrange, not too expensive board, but it is reliable, fast, and overclocks well. It doesn't support SLI, but you really do not need sli for midrange, right? But if you REALLY wanted sli, you could go a little bit more for a 680i chipset, but that does not support penryn quads :(. For our p35 board , we chose the ABIT ip35-e.

3. RAM - 4 gigs in $800!! No way!! But yes way! This awesome set of OCZ 4gb ddr2 800 will do you well, and it's only $66 after rebates!!!

4. Video Card - This is a no-brainer, the evga 8800gt is the best budget-midrange vidcard!

If you want something a little bit cheaper than that, you could go with an 8800gts . ($220 before $200 after rebate) or a HD3870. ($240) If you want something ULTRA cheap you could go with a HD3850, which will also give reasonable performance.

5. Case and Power Supply - We chose the Antec Sonata III because of the great PSU included with it and a solid, cheap case. (PSU is Earthwatts 500W). And to add to the value, it is only $90 after MIR!!! (Same as the original earthwatts)

6. CD/DVD drive - Who could forget the cd/dvd drive? We chose the SH-S203N. The predecessor of it was the MPC best of the best award, and it is CHEAP! For maximum performance, we chose two of them, which would be about $60.

7. OS - Not included! All you need to do is borrow an XP cd from a friend, then deactivate xp on your current machine, then install XP on your new PC! If you do not want to do that, then pick up winxp home (IMO you do not need pro). It is about $90 on newegg, you can get pro for $70 (upgrade) if you are an academic student.

So total that comes to about $920, not including rebates or s&h. We hope you enjoyed! If you have other ideas or disagree with our thoughts, please post in the comments section.