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I will tell you what I did with all MY extra bays:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998031

Love it! Combine Linux with AHCI with these racks and have kewlness! Throw in any number of regular, cheap SATA 3.5" drives. Hotswap. Activity light. Create a software RAID (that is what I did, and it really works). Use it for removable backup that stores more than a USB drive and is much faster. Play around with different boot options.

I put in four of those suckers. The 5th bay is my DVD drive. Oh- and the floppy bay? Do this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998038

And now I have dual hotswap 2.5 inch drives in the mix too!!

I will tell you what I did with all MY extra bays:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998031

Love it! Combine Linux with AHCI with these racks and have kewlness! Throw in any number of regular, cheap SATA 3.5" drives. Hotswap. Activity light. Create a software RAID (that is what I did, and it really works). Use it for removable backup that stores more than a USB drive and is much faster. Play around with different boot options.

I put in four of those suckers. The 5th bay is my DVD drive. Oh- and the floppy bay? Do this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998038

And now I have dual hotswap 2.5 inch drives in the mix too!!

For just over a buck, it's not a bad deal.

Since it's actually $8 when you include shipping, it's not so good a deal after all. Even buying 10 only lowers the per-unit total cost to $3.

Chances are you can hit a local shop and get them for close to the same price.

I've looked, and they are about $5 in local stores. I purchased a case of 24 from Best Buy for Business for less than $30 including shipping, but that was about 3 years ago.

I use this case for my smaller servers, which allows me to have 6 hard drives by using three of the 5-1/4" bays with adapters. With this motherboard, you can put an awful lot of computing power into a small space, and it's much quieter than rack mount solutions.

I've been using one of these for over a year. Handy for having your OS on a 4x SSD RAID. Uses only one 5.25" bay:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816710003

Be sure to get the beefier model (with the fans) if you want to use 4x VRaptors.

Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective

Sure you can put more 3.5" drives in those bays, but you can only attach one side unless you have something put inside the larger bay so you can stabilize both sides of the drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811993004&cm_re=5.25_bracket-_-11-993-004-_-Product

For just over a buck, it's not a bad deal. Chances are you can hit a local shop and get them for close to the same price.

I also have one. My PC has no 3.5" bays, the entire thing is 5.25" bays, so these 4-in-3 Cooler Master hard drive bays is where my four hard drives go. Huge 120mm fan keeps the drives very cool.

Reasonably priced at only $20
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817993002

An acquaintance of mine converted his extra bays in a full-size tower to a storage space for often-needed electronics. There were drawers for transistors, LEDs, regular diodes, some ICs, and the other little bits he used often in his robot-building hobby. The top bay had a current limiter in it, cleaning and isolating the power supplied to plugs on the front, fed from the PC supply.

I found one. Cool idea: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811997201

I have a nice HD bay fan It works out great, because my HD bays are directly in line with my CPU heatsink, I got a couple more MHz out of my overclock upon installing this,

Three 5.25" bays hold twelve 2.5" drives with a combined capacity of twelve TB.

Three 5.25" drive bays above each other can hold a case with four 3.5" drive bays and a 120mm fan. Thermaltake sells them, as do zillions of other companies.

Five drives actually.

Right now, that advantage is tilted so far in Intel's favor that 4 Intel Nehalem cores are generally going to be better than 6 AMD cores at the same clock.

The evidence doesnt support your assertion. Yes, Core2 is more efficient, but you are imagining that its 50% better clock-for-clock (that 4 Intel cores beats 6 AMD cores) You might be able to find some obscure task where thats the case, but in general its just not true.

They had expensive high end models back when they had the aces (when it was Athlon 64 / Opteron versus Inte'ls Pentium 4 line). Now they don't.

Um, now you are talking about server chips (what the hell do you think an opteron is) Intel had server chips too.. but you want to compare AMD server prices with Pentium 4 prices? Please. You arent even being honest with yourself here.

Lets talk about server chips, where AMD is beating the snot out of Intel with 12-core chips vs Intel's 8.

Intel isn't winning at the high end of servers because you simply cannot build a 48-core server built on Intel. The best you can do is 32 cores.

The mark of a liar is not being honest with others. The mark of a fanboy is not even being honest with yourself. Stop being a fanboy. Deep down you know that you are arguing without facts to support your assertions, so why do you do it?

Like the other poster N0Man74 said, you could buy a cheap card a couple generations up. Here's one of the cheapest, most bang for the buck AGP 4x/8x cards, at $60:
ATI HD 3650 AGP 4x/8x

Meets the system requirements of a ATI HD 2600 XT or better. All priced out for you. 120 vs. 40 stream processors and 128-bit vs. 64-bit for about $10 more than the $50 cards. Might as well.

Yeah, you're better off long-term just biting the bullet and going PCI-Express but it's an option.

really? whats competative at the $300 point with AMD Phenom II X6 1090T from Intel? No really, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115225 [newegg.com] is probably the best at stock speeds and it's only a 2.8ghz quad core
And yet the i7-920 (which is only a 2.66GHz quad-core) seems to hold it's own quite well against the Phenom II X6. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/146?vs=47 . It seems the amd is generally winning in video encoding while the intel is winning in most other stuff (unfortunately anandtechs charts are hard to read because some tests are lower is better and others are higher is better :( )

and uses more expensive motherboards than the AMD.
If you are trying to build a cheap system the i7-8xx series is probablly a better bet than the i7-9xx series It tends to give more performance per dollar and runs on cheaper motherboards. The downside is you get less PCIe and less memory slots.

really? whats competative at the $300 point with AMD Phenom II X6 1090T from Intel? No really, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115225 is probably the best at stock speeds and it's only a 2.8ghz quad core(yes yes hyper-threading, but it doesn't work as well as real cores last I heard) 130W, and uses more expensive motherboards than the AMD.

A $300 cpu isn't really "low end", more like upper mid range. Sure the i7-980X will beat the pants off the 1090T, but you can buy 3 1090T's for the same price as the 980X. You certainly can do 2(including ram and motherboard), for the $1000 the 980X commands.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3674/amds-sixcore-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-1055t-reviewed for some numbers.

The problems that killed the 5.25 were power draw and speed. Nowadays, I would expect that the power draw would be lowered due to the use of plastic substrate with a film of metal rather then the old time solid metal platters, as well as the speed isn't such a big deal, just throw a huge buffer on it, or SSD buffer and you are all set. I could definitely deal with a 20TB 5.25, or 40TB Full height 5.25. The hard drives in my home computer already take up that space anyways:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121405

Heck, they even take up three slots.

I actually still have a Full Height Seagate drive, SCSI, 47GB, it takes about 5 minutes to spin up, but had enormous space for the time period. Unfortunately, a capacitor fell off of it, and I haven't had the motivation to fix it as I have so much storage on all my machines.

but I think the maturity of hard disk technology and the minimum cost posed by the complicated mechanical design will make hard disks obsolete for most applications in a few more years.

Such has been the claim for easily more than a decade and yet HDDs are still around.

Hey, people thought 3.5" disks would be here forever, too.

Since when did they leave? Floppy drives and floppy disks.

I know this is a "My anecdote vs. yours" thing, but I've used standard power supplies in dozens of Dell machines over the years including several Optiplex GX 270's. In most cases I had to modify the case--drill mounting holes or cut the opening bigger for cooling fan or power plug clearance--but I never ran in to a situation where the wiring was different. In fact, I worked in a dell shop and was certified to work on dells when this GX270 fiasco was going on. They sent me a free power supply tester that was pretty much identical to this one except it had a dell logo. I used that tester on many standard power supplies and the LEDs for the voltages on the 20/24 pin connector worked exactly the same way. It's worth noting that all of the GX270s I worked on were the tower form factor. I know they used different boards in the desktop form factor machines so I don't have evidence either way there.

> big long ass url here.

You cut the link at the first & ... like so...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815235002

While it wouldn't be as cheap as making your own, newegg has a set of clip ons for the circularly polarized films. big long ass url here. I don't know if that set would fit on yours but i'd imagine there are some out there. This might end up more comfortable and last longer than the ones you make yourself.

...another $8 cable (includes shipping). I understand the point of the article is that for the non-techy consumer of Hi-Def equipment these new requirements are going to cause problems.

And some PATA hard disks that will be useless shortly.

Hard drive enclosure will help with that.

Two options:

1) Use a single optical drive (I've never used 2 in a mac). That leaves you with a single e-sata connection

2) Instead of the cable, buy This card for $6 more ($25).

Again, it's a mac pro. Use the expansion slots and feel happy.

Simon.

If you want to put them in laptops then you either have to make them fit in the standard laptop drive form factor or convince laptop manufacturers to redesign thier product line to fit your device.

Besides a cubiod package seems like quite a nice form factor to design electronics for, just stack a load of boards that are all the same size and shape. What would you suggest instead?

Afaict the real problem at the moment is cost not ability to pack the parts into a given package. You can get a 512GB SSD in the 2.5 inch 9.5mm high format that most laptops take ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139115 ) which is not that much smaller than the largest HDD you can get in that form factor (750GB) but it will set you back $1,439.00 ( ) which is likely as much as the laptop you are fitting it to.

I see you don't know how that works, let your old pal Hairyfeet enlighten you with a little history. It actually started with the Celeron, which because the Pentium was so high at the time was selling like hotcakes. So Intel simply blew the cache on perfectly good Pentiums and sold those as Celerons. Fast forward to today and the dual and triple core CPUs are simply quads (last I head AMD only makes quads and 6 cores, and the rest are disabled rebins) with two core disabled. While it is true that a percentage of them had a bad core it is also true that many have good cores that were simply disabled. The AMD I built for my youngest boy had the dual core I originally used in my PC, and I was able to go into BIOS and enable the third core (the fourth I never could enable, maybe bad?) and it purrs like a kitten.

So if you have a dual or a triple lying around and have a board that will let you enable cores go for it. It is pretty trivial to see if it is bad simply by running some CPU benchmarks and see if it throws errors or not. Another trick you may not know about is because those black edition duals and triples are actually quads they will usually overclock higher as there is more die space than CPU, especially on the duals. So you can either unlock and get a cheap triple or quad, or OC and get a really fast dual. Personally with triples starting at $75 for a 3GHz and quads at $91 I just don't really see much point in trying to unlock cores anymore. I mean they are so cheap, why bother?

I see you don't know how that works, let your old pal Hairyfeet enlighten you with a little history. It actually started with the Celeron, which because the Pentium was so high at the time was selling like hotcakes. So Intel simply blew the cache on perfectly good Pentiums and sold those as Celerons. Fast forward to today and the dual and triple core CPUs are simply quads (last I head AMD only makes quads and 6 cores, and the rest are disabled rebins) with two core disabled. While it is true that a percentage of them had a bad core it is also true that many have good cores that were simply disabled. The AMD I built for my youngest boy had the dual core I originally used in my PC, and I was able to go into BIOS and enable the third core (the fourth I never could enable, maybe bad?) and it purrs like a kitten.

So if you have a dual or a triple lying around and have a board that will let you enable cores go for it. It is pretty trivial to see if it is bad simply by running some CPU benchmarks and see if it throws errors or not. Another trick you may not know about is because those black edition duals and triples are actually quads they will usually overclock higher as there is more die space than CPU, especially on the duals. So you can either unlock and get a cheap triple or quad, or OC and get a really fast dual. Personally with triples starting at $75 for a 3GHz and quads at $91 I just don't really see much point in trying to unlock cores anymore. I mean they are so cheap, why bother?

If you aren't buying a OEM copy, how much is Win7 home premium?
So i'm not sure if i qualify as a OEM when building my on computer not for sale. So to be 100% legal, Newegg has http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116716 Win7 home premium full, 179.99 which is $20 off the normal price. I'm not sure about the requirements to be in full compliance with the OEM license, but i do know that if i install gentoo/ubuntu/fedora/suse i'll be in compliance with the license.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116754&cm_re=windows_7_home_premium-_-32-116-754-_-Product 99 for a copy not 199.99

They could have got a dual core atom for $79.99, vs the $98.98 their system cost, but then it would be an Intel system and the article specifies that "there was never much question that this build would be AMD-based". They paid $18.99 for not questioning the well-known fact that AMD offers a better price.

Brainwave scanning controllers DO exist. But they are a lot less precise and are slower than even console controls.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826100006

Quick search result although I think we have slightly older black and white versions.

Last time I checked though, the RAM and MB for AMD were more expensive

I cant even begin to imagine how you "checked." There is no such thing as "Intel Ram" or "AMD Ram"

Intel-socket motherboards are generally more expensive than AMD-socket motherboards for the same feature sets.

Sticking to only motherboards that offer PCIe 2.0 x16, SATA 6GB/s, USB 3.0, and DDR3 sockets (basically, what would constitute a future-proof motherboard as it is today)

The best priced Intel board on NewEgg is $125 and this is actually a very decent one from MSI.

That same manufacturer also offers a comparable AMD board for $25 less. Also a very decent board.

These are the facts of the matter, and that AMD board is actually a bit better overall with its *6* SATA 6GB ports vs the Intel boards *2*

..and on top of it all, while that was the cheapest Intel-based motherboard for the feature set, that is NOT the cheapest AMD-based board with the same feature set.

You failed at "checking" the prices.

Last time I checked though, the RAM and MB for AMD were more expensive

I cant even begin to imagine how you "checked." There is no such thing as "Intel Ram" or "AMD Ram"

Intel-socket motherboards are generally more expensive than AMD-socket motherboards for the same feature sets.

Sticking to only motherboards that offer PCIe 2.0 x16, SATA 6GB/s, USB 3.0, and DDR3 sockets (basically, what would constitute a future-proof motherboard as it is today)

The best priced Intel board on NewEgg is $125 and this is actually a very decent one from MSI.

That same manufacturer also offers a comparable AMD board for $25 less. Also a very decent board.

These are the facts of the matter, and that AMD board is actually a bit better overall with its *6* SATA 6GB ports vs the Intel boards *2*

..and on top of it all, while that was the cheapest Intel-based motherboard for the feature set, that is NOT the cheapest AMD-based board with the same feature set.

You failed at "checking" the prices.

"However there is a significant cost difference that must be factored in when deciding 4 vs. 6 cores (at least last I checked, there was a huge price 'upgrade' for equal GHz +2 cores)" Not so: Newegg has the 6 core 2.8ghz AMD 1055T for $200, and Microcenter was recently offering $50 off a 1055T compatible AM3 motherboard when you bought a $200 1055T. The motherboards are only $55 so you're only paying $5 for the board. So essentially you pay $205 to get a 6-core CPU and a new motherboard. That's a very good price to make the leap to 6-cores.

I think the GP was talking about Intel pricing, where you're pretty much guaranteed to get fleeced. AMD is great on performance/$, but they don't have any chips that compete above the mid to mid-high performance market.

"Someone hasn't seen the EVGA SR-2 mobo, yet."

Sad, someone will drop $600 on that board, drop another $2500 on two 6-core Xeon and be the big swinging dick on their forum for the next 3 or 4 years, until everyone's on 24 core cpus for $500, and eventually they'll start laughing at him for wasting 3 grand on just cpus and a motherboard.

Remember quad core cpus just came out 3 years ago and we're already on 12 cores. Does anyone doubt we'll be on 24 or more cores in 3 years?

"However there is a significant cost difference that must be factored in when deciding 4 vs. 6 cores (at least last I checked, there was a huge price 'upgrade' for equal GHz +2 cores)"

Not so: Newegg has the 6 core 2.8ghz AMD 1055T for $200, and Microcenter was recently offering $50 off a 1055T compatible AM3 motherboard when you bought a $200 1055T. The motherboards are only $55 so you're only paying $5 for the board.

So essentially you pay $205 to get a 6-core CPU and a new motherboard. That's a very good price to make the leap to 6-cores.

After watching the video I'm going to have to put this in the Do Not Want category.

First, no scrolling.

Second, I still can't get my M$ wireless mice working perfectly, I can only imagine the problems I'd have with this.

I'll stick to my corded MX518 for a few more years, thanks

The 8800 line is the earliest line that offers up their CUDA / DirectCompute / whatever stuff, as well as the DXVA stuff.

If you want to be cheap, get a used 8800 GT. There will be plenty flooding the market because of people getting the 460. If you can afford $200 bucks, then yeah, go for the 460.

Your concerns are power and noise, so you want the 8800 GT or 460 level of card (contrary to my advice to the gamer and "don't fucking care" crowds). I'd recommend the 460 if you can justify the cost simply because it's probably not defective (while the 8800 GT is guaranteed to be defective). You may also be able to find some GTX or GTS 2x0 cards used for under $100. Those are great for what you want, though it's a minefield because some of those (I don't know off of the top of my head) are simply rebadged parts from the previous generation.

On the ATi side, everything post the HD 2000 series should be fine.
For $50, why not grab a 5450 like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150469 , or similar from whatever OEM you like? I'm not as familiar with ATI's GPGPU stuff, so of course, make sure your software supports any card you intend to purchase. I did buy an AGP 4650 (or 3650?) a year ago for an aging system I wanted to get video decoding working on. ATi pretends that variant of the card doesn't even exist anymore, but I was able to get the DXVA thing working.

HDMI outs will work with DVI just fine assuming your monitor isn't a DVI-Analog ONLY monitor. Cards usually ship with an adapter. If not, a few bucks after tax/shipping on Monoprice/Amazon.

Yes, this 900$ motherboard, 32 x 8GB memory modules each about 450$ and four 305$ processors and a 200$ power supply will let you test 256 GB of memory.

Sure, it costs about $20k but what the hell, some cars are more expensive. You won't be able to use Windows 7 on it anyways, as I think it's limited to two physical processors.

Actually, I bought a GT240 (for $10 more than this, but it was 6 months ago and had a free Capcom game (I chose Resident Evil 5) with it). The difference is that there were two models for the same price: a 1GB DDR3 model and a 512MB GDDR5 model... and one of my friends warned me that the GDDR5 model was probably the better buy, simply because the memory clock speed was more likely to be a bottleneck before the memory amount was.

Speaking of which, that exact card as well as its 1GB DDR3 edition are $64.99 on NewEgg after MIR. The 512MB GDDR5 model has $7.56 shipping, the 1GB DDR3 model has free shipping.

Actually, I bought a GT240 (for $10 more than this, but it was 6 months ago and had a free Capcom game (I chose Resident Evil 5) with it). The difference is that there were two models for the same price: a 1GB DDR3 model and a 512MB GDDR5 model... and one of my friends warned me that the GDDR5 model was probably the better buy, simply because the memory clock speed was more likely to be a bottleneck before the memory amount was.

Speaking of which, that exact card as well as its 1GB DDR3 edition are $64.99 on NewEgg after MIR. The 512MB GDDR5 model has $7.56 shipping, the 1GB DDR3 model has free shipping.

An Nvidia 250GTS *is* a 9800 with slightly less power consumption. If you can't afford a 280, a 250 is a reasonable purchase. Makes more sense than buying a 9800 today.

I've been seeing 9800s for around $80, so depending on what titles you want to play it might be fine. I bought a GT240 which is 3/4 the processors of a 250, it is a little more than 3/4 the card for around 1/2 the wattage. right now newegg has it for $69.99 after MIR and $6.98 shipping. It's non-SLI, it goes with my GA-MA770-UD3P and Phenom II X3 720, all (relatively) low power. And mb/cpu/vid each cost $100 when I got them which is my personal maximum, and the board while slightly warty (black screen on XPwSP3 install on various known good video cards) has every port I desired on the backplane and an absolute raft of USB2 and SATA connectors without sacrificing anything, except some stuff is moved to headers.

Yes. Service providers work for the consumer who (should) demand value for their money. Everybody is CTV shocked & dazed. For the same amount of $ + blu-ray, netflix, pandora, youtube. The net's the limit.

I don't know if I'd go the "Best Buy Special" route, because as a PC repairman I can tell you those low end PCs tend to have seriously shitty parts such as lousy caps, fans, and PSUs. In my experience both buying and building for customers I've found that DIY builds simply last MUCH longer, since the manufacturer of the parts can't hide behind an OEM if they put out a bad part.

I've found the longest lasting builds to be based upon business class motherboards, such as those by Gigabyte or ECS. For example I have sold several of this ECS board as well as using it for the basis of my current gamer rig. It supports all 95w AMD quad Phenom II chips, which a quad can be had for as little as $95, up to 32Gb of DDR2 RAM (and 4 slots which is MUCH cheaper to load up than a 2 slot version) which I loaded up with 8Gb of DDR 2 800, plenty of SATA 2 and USB slots, just a great solid board. And while I picked up mine along with some others in a Tigerdirect bundle, you can buy the new version for just $45 after MIR, and the new one supports DDR 3.

So while you can if you get lucky save a couple of bucks buying the low end "Best Buy Special" I'd say in the long run it simply isn't worth it. By going DIY you'll have a machine that will easily outlast the special by two times or more. I should know as I've had to part out more "Best Buy Specials" than I can even count, whereas the only DIY builds I've sold that I can think of off hand that are dead was one lightning strike and one where the guy refused to shut it off when his AC when out in July and cooked it. Not to mention it also removes a lot of headaches, as those specials tend to develop "weird" errors long before they die, such as data corruption or cutting off by itself. A shitty non popped cap or bad trace can be impossible to see but cause all kinds of hell.

For a few bucks more, you can get a much beefier GPU...
      $125 (MiR) 5770 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131328

The 5770 is twice as fast athe 240. Compare 103 fps vs. 54 fps @ 1680x01050.
      http://www.anandtech.com/show/2917/12

It appears Newegg is only stocking the GTS 250; lowest price is $90.
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134094&cm_re=geforce_gts_250-_-14-134-094-_-Product

I agree the GTS 250 would be a inexpensive gaming card. For better bang/buck though, I would still recommend the 5770 as you can pick up another one in a year's time at a reduced price, and get double the frame rate. :-)

For a few bucks more, you can get a much beefier GPU...
      $125 (MiR) 5770 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131328

The 5770 is twice as fast athe 240. Compare 103 fps vs. 54 fps @ 1680x01050.
      http://www.anandtech.com/show/2917/12

It appears Newegg is only stocking the GTS 250; lowest price is $90.
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134094&cm_re=geforce_gts_250-_-14-134-094-_-Product

I agree the GTS 250 would be a inexpensive gaming card. For better bang/buck though, I would still recommend the 5770 as you can pick up another one in a year's time at a reduced price, and get double the frame rate. :-)

every USB stick (make that all removable media) should be like these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820709004

That is actually quite easy with the new ATI number schema. The current is 5xxx, the previous 4xxx, the higher the number the more powerful (and expensive) the card. For example a 58xx will be more than a 57xx or a 56xx. Generally the budget cards are thex3xx- x5xx, midrange x6xx- x7xx, and high end x8xx or x9xx for crazy money.

But really any $75-$125 card will do just about anything you'd want it to do, spending more than $150 is nuts unless you are doing hardcore GPU work like CAD or just want the biggest ePeen. As I said I'm still using the HD4650 I bought when I built this machine over a year ago, and so far plays any game I want at 1600x900 native on my widescreen. That card cost me a whole $36 after MIR, but now you can get a 5450 with a Gb of DDR3 for $50 that short of Crysis maxed out will do anything you'd probably desire. Bump up to around $110 and you can have a seriously fast GPU from ATI that'll last you 2-3 years no prob. Can't say about Nvidia, as after bumpgate I won't buy from them.

Forgot to add,
$20-$40 CPU cooler

If you go the CF route, you need to beef up the Power Supply as well... $+30

$100 PSU CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire 80+ (Mail In Rebate)
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139006

> can be had for $300-500. A gaming PC needs more CPU and GPU horsepower, and probably more RAM and HD, which can easily double the price.

Eh? You don't need to spend THAT much to build a half decent gaming box, if you do your homework on pricing... (i.e. haven't taken advantage of any combo deals)

= Budget Gaming Box = (single channel)

$180 CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Retail
        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103727
$77 MOBO: GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P (422 reviews)
        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128392
$110 7-7-7-20 MEM: OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227478
$70 PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-450VX 450W ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139003
$50 CASE: Antec Three Hundred (mail in rebate)
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042
$145 GPU: $150 ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB (390W Load CF2)
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121363
-----
$632

Not including Monitor, Mouse, Keyboard, HD, but you should have those laying around if you are upgrading.

If you want to go the Crossfire (CF) route, then double the price of the mobo, and add a second 5770 a year or two later.

> can be had for $300-500. A gaming PC needs more CPU and GPU horsepower, and probably more RAM and HD, which can easily double the price.

Eh? You don't need to spend THAT much to build a half decent gaming box, if you do your homework on pricing... (i.e. haven't taken advantage of any combo deals)

= Budget Gaming Box = (single channel)

$180 CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Retail
        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103727
$77 MOBO: GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P (422 reviews)
        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128392
$110 7-7-7-20 MEM: OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227478
$70 PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-450VX 450W ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139003
$50 CASE: Antec Three Hundred (mail in rebate)
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042
$145 GPU: $150 ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB (390W Load CF2)
      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121363
-----
$632

Not including Monitor, Mouse, Keyboard, HD, but you should have those laying around if you are upgrading.

If you want to go the Crossfire (CF) route, then double the price of the mobo, and add a second 5770 a year or two later.