How much would this set me back?

The_Absolute

I am in the process of selling my grandparent's house, and buying them a new one, which is much less expensive, very close to my residence. I will have many Thousands of dollars left over. My brother wants to replace his single core Celeron dinosaur laptop for a mid-range gaming computer that costs about $2,000. I've been told that I was also allowed to spend $2,000 on anything that I wanted if I help with the moving process. I.e. moving heavy furniture, packing boxes, renting and loading a trailer.

I have a Gateway FX 6710-01 gaming desktop. The one with the C2Q Q9400, 6GB DDR2 RAM, and a Radeon HD 4850. I was considering building a custom AMD gaming rig, and I was looking at a Phenom II X4 965BE, an Asus Crosshair Formula III, 6 GB of DDR3 RAM, and a Radeon HD 5850 or 5870. I already own a Coolermaster HAF 932 full tower case, and a corsair TX750 750W PSU. Should I be able to get those things and still be within a $2,000 budget? I don't see the need for an expensive blu-ray drive, or a TB or SDD hard drive. Any DVD drive and a decent sized HDD will do.

Initially I wanted a Ci7 rig, but that would probably put me WAY over budget. Probably close to $3,000. The Ci7 975 extreme edition costs $1,000!!! AMD has the best hardware, for the price, and the new AMD PC with the hardware I stated above, will eat my Gateway FX 6710-01 alive!

My current Gateway FX 6710-01 desktop was purchased for $1,300 at a major electronics retailer in my town, to replace my old Pentium 4, windows XP rig, which I built in 2003, which was completely dead and fried. (it wouldn't even boot into the OS) and the hardware in it was discontinued and obsolete. I could always sell the One I have now and get about $600-$700 for it.

I'm not sure about this, but I heard that future AMD processors will be fully compatible with most AM3 socket motherboards.

rcgldr

Ci7 960 is 3.2 ghz versus the extremes 3.33ghz, and it's < $600 (USA) versus the extreme's near $1000 price.

hamster143

It's a bad financial move to go for the most expensive hardware available. Two years from now, $1000 chips will cost $200 and $500 chips will cost $150. And the difference in performance between the $1000 and the $500 chip is barely noticeable.

In this situation, I'd probably go for Core i7 860. It is only marginally slower than the 975 extreme (10-20% in most situations), it's faster in most tests than Phenom 965BE, it eats less energy than either (95 W vs. 125 & 130 W), and it costs $280.

The_Absolute

How much would all of this cost me?

Phenom II X4 965BE

ASUS Crosshair Formula III

6 GB of DDR3 1333 or 1600 MHz RAM (will the mobo use 1600 MHz DDR3?)

Radeon HD 5850 or HD 5870

Remove, and use my Corsair TX750, 750W PSU I have in my current PC.

Coolermaster HAF 932 full tower case

750GB 7200 RPM 32MB cache HDD (SSD's are expensive and have a siginicantly smaller storage capacity)

18x DVD ROM (I don't see the need for blu-ray, as I do not use my PC for watching blu-ray movies)

Possibly a Fatal1ty X-Fi xtreme gamer sound card

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)