Looking to the summer to build a new computer

[Lemur]

You don't ask small questions, do you, Rabbit? I know Ars Technica does a semi-regular build guide, with a God Box, a Medium Box and a Budget Box. Unfortunately, my Google-fu is weak tonight, and I can't find it. If you're willing to shell out a couple of bucks, Maximum PC does a build guide in every issue, and they keep it pretty up-to-date. I don't know what the mag costs these days, but subscriptions are dirt cheap. (Yes, it's on Lemur's bathroom reading list, along with The Economist. You need good literature on the can.)

What's coming up? Lessee, there's probably going to be a new connector between your screen and your vid card, but nobody's sure which one it will be. No point in waiting for that, since adapters will be cheap and plentiful. Intel's got a new dual-CPU thing called Skulltrail, but that's not really meant for gamers. More for your local 3D artist or molecular biologist. With quad-core on-die CPUs flooding the market, there's no reason a gamer would need a dual-cpu boxen (in effect, an eight-CPU rig).

SATA 2 will become more common, but that's neither here nor there, since current drives aren't even close to saturating the SATA pipe. Flash drives are going to be a big deal for notebooks, but it's gonna remain costly for a while, say a year or two.

AMD/ATI are still underdogs, especially with the introduction of Intel's new 45nm chips. On the videocard front it's a little more competitive, with the Nvidia holding the price/performance crown across the board, but not by the same margin as in the CPU race.

Oh, I found the Ars System Guide while I was Googling and Wiking for this note. Here it is.

There, that will give you the beginnings of something to chew on.