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I'm building a system for mostly gaming, so that is my primary focus, but I do use fraps or other screencap software SOMETIMES for guild videos and whatnot so it is a secondary concern for me, but above all game performance is my primary goal within my budget.  I have built systems before, and overclocked before, but not in 4-5 years since I was in school and couldn't afford the time or money.

 

Right now I'm looking at quad cores, specifically either the Intel Q9550 or the Phenom 9850, but two things concern me.  Since clockspeed is the biggest priority for gaming, I'm wondering if I should be driven towards the higher end dual core setups instead.  My first setup I had planned was the AMD but as I thought about it I'm not sure for one, how  much advantage I'll be losing in terms of the clock speed impact, and the lack of DDR3 availability on AMD motherboards concerns me just a bit.  For either of these setups I'd have at least 4 gigs of ram to start with a goal to get up to 8 at some point.  Does anyone have any input on how significant this will wind up being other than the usual AMD vs Intel banter?

I thought about hitting up the system build board with this but what I do right now hinges primarily on the processor and the motherboard options that leaves me with so I think it fits best here, at least for now.

Go for an Intel processor. If you're going to be running a couple of programs simultaneously such as a game and some video capture program, you might be better off with a quad core, since most games will utilize up to 2 cores, and the other 1-2 cores can work on capturing video.

In order to utilize 4GB of RAM, you'd need a 64bit OS.

One thing that you'll have to decide now is if you want to do SLI or Crossfire, and if you even want to have 2 video cards in such configuration in the first place. That will limit your motherboard choices and would be one of the first places to start.

Thanks.  I ultimately I guess the standards I'm trying to reach would be playing Crysis with some reasonable quality.  My GPU plans will account for that fine.  I'm pretty much set on a top end card so that won't be a bottleneck.  My Main concern with a quad core is that for the same price I could get something that natively clocks above 3ghz in a dual core.  I'm more willing to sacrifice screencapping ability for game performance than I am willing to give up some game performance to fraps.  As long as the quad core won't be a serious limiter I do think that would be best. 

I believe Crysis is quad core optimized, so you'd be better off there, especially when coupling it with a high end video card.

Get the Q9550.

I thought Q9550 is the highest clocked regular quad so you pay like $100 for the extra 166MHz. You can put that $100 in something else or in your wallet. Get the Q9450 instead...you can probably do 8 x 400MHz easy. I would not want to get AMD processors because they run a bit warm (125W for 9850). As far as motherboards are concerned, get the P45 or X48/38 chipset so you can have 1600MHz FSB to overclock. As for video cards, you can afford to get XCed 4870's ($600)

To be honest, I'm hesitant to overclock.  I've only done it once before, and it was a long time ago.  I don't know when I'll be able to upgrade again too so I don't want to shorten the product life much if I can avoid it.  Its probably going to be a week or two before I put orders in, so I'll see if the price drop a lot of people are expecting comes around.  If not, well, you've certainly given me something to consider on it. 

You don't have to worry about overclocking, just make sure to keep voltages within the recommended range, and you'll be fine. Also, cool the processor properly.

Asus for instance has a utility that will overclock your processor to a certain speed when it gets loaded, therefore your processor might be overclocked a maximum of 5%-10% of the time, and other times when browsing the net, it'll stick with stock speed.

Q9550 all the way ^^