I know nothing about gaming PCs, but before people come in to help you I just thought I'd point you in roughly the right direction. The Falcon Guide is a handy-dandy PC building guide made by 4chan's /g/. It comes in three flavors, full, lite, and simple.

Full: http://tinyurl.com/FalconGuide
Lite: http://tinyurl.com/FalconGuideLite
Simple: http://tinyurl.com/FalconGuideSimple

And the full version just updated two days ago, don't know about the others though. I'm not telling you to use these and be gone or anything, they're just here to help you get a rough outline on what you want.

BF3 specs haven't been released yet.

Go for quad core at least, I hear.

Thanks gentleman. That guide should be sufficient. I can get an "exceptional" machine. Of course, while SSDs are vastly superior speed wise, I don't deem it necessary so I can probably shave off a couple of dollars.

>>3379

Do you like load times? No? Then get an SSD.

>>3380

Don't mind load times actually. I'm more concerned about picking up the right card set. I know the 6970 is a better single card, but I'm still wondering whether it'd be better to possibly go with 6870 crossfire. I want to have a rig that can play Battlefield 3 and Arkham City at max specs. Also Witcher 2 at super high specs as well. Not sure which route to take.

I can help you with a build list if you like, when it's not 1am.

There's not enough out about BF3 and Arkham City yet to guarantee any setup will be able to run them at max specs but AC is using the tried Unreal Tournament 3 engine and that's been the basis of a bunch of popular games so I'm guessing any modern card should be fine for that. On the other hand, BF3 will introduce a new iteration of Frostbite so that's a wildcard.

>>3399

Thanks, some people recommended I try out this guide as well: http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f255/want-to-build-a-new-intel-or-amd-system-revised-2011-and-updated-regularly-448272.html.

I'm going to probably just get either one 6970 or one GTX 570. I run at a lower resolution and from what I've read but I'm not quite sure on, I believe the gtx570 performs better at lower resolutions.

>>3404

Yeah, I think single card is the simplest way to go. As for 6970 vs 570, I'll just link you to reviews from a couple of sites I trust so you can decide for yourself. They're all 6970 reviews since it came out after, so it wasn't out in time to be compared in any GTX 570 reviews.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/38899-amd-radeon-hd-6970-hd-6950-review.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_6970_PCS_Plus/
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/Radeon_HD_6970/

I linked the TPU ones so you have a larger sample but I'd really recommend against Powercolor and never had any experience with HIS. But, we can compare brands after the model is chosen.

So pic is what I decided on. I can't quite however decide between those two hard drives. I've heard bad stuff about the WD, but it has a larger cache..which I'm not sure if it would make a big difference vs 32/

>>3474
I had 2 WD 1TB HDD die on me while I was using a 300GB Seagate as my main. I then got a 1TB Samsung and 500GB Seagate as a bundle. This was a couple of years ago, my 300GB, 500GB and 1TB are still running. But I've heard people with WD aren't having so many problems any more.

>>3474

I've had no problems with WD's drives except from their externals, more specifically I've a couple of externals on which the drive-cable micro-USB occasionally cuts out when the male plug is at certain angles. The problem's been corrected in their newer generation though.

/rant