Im in the process of building a computer...

oh yeah i plan on getting the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB graphics card also

You have to balance it. How much are you willing to spend for greater computing power? It each upgrade will cost you more than the previous. Personally I would get the 2.8 GHz. I don’t think the price for the difference .2 GHz (well i guess .2 times 4) for the 3.0GHz justifies the price.

Quad Core 2.8GHz

I agree with box, you have to remember, with that one fifth of a gigahertz, you’re actually paying for four fifths. How much RAM do you intend on using? If more than 4 gigs, defiantly get the 3 Ghz.

Dont get the GX2, get the Radeon HD 4870 1G. It is a beast. I have one and love it. Crysis maxed setting 1680×1050 at an average of 48fps, lowest it hit ever hit was 29fps

As for the processor, if you know a thing or two about overclocking, go for the lower clock, the penryn core intels overclock amazingly. Otherwise, id go with the 2.8Ghz. They charge much more for the 3Ghz than necessary.

You don’t need a quad core. Say a 2.8Ghz Dual Core is better than a Quad Core 2.4Ghz. What’s this? you might say, 2×2.8 is only 5.6Ghz, where as 2.4×4 = 9.6Ghz. In reality most programs, including Crysis, etc can only use 2 cores at once. So unless you’re running 2 games of Crysis at the same time you only need a Dual Core processor, like a 3Ghz Dual Core, it’ll save you lots of money compared to a Quad Core. A Dual Core 3Ghz will overclock to 3.8 – 4.2Ghz comfortably with a good CPU fan.

—I’m running a Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16Ghz OC’d to 4.0Ghz, with a nice aftermarket cooler. I might go higher, but then I’ll have to consider water cooling.

As joey said, most current gen programs do do not even utilize all four cores. Save yourself almost $200 and buy an E8400 or E8500, then use the extra cash and get a better GPU b

Make sure you don’t cheap on the Motherboard either, have one with 2 PCI-E slots, therefore if you want to upgrade in the future just bung a second graphics card in. Like this one only $220 AUD

For a gamer you need to look at not just the clock speed but also the cache. If there is a big difference in the amount e.g.the Q8200 is 2.33ghz and the Q9450 is 2.66ghz and may not seem much difference but when you look at the L2 cache the Q8200 only has 4mb compared to 12mb on the Q9450 so you are getting 3 times as much L2 cache and 1.32ghz faster processing (.33×4) making the Q9450 wipe the floor with the Q8200.

I’d recommend avoiding the bleeding edge fastest model as you pay a premium price and get more bang for your buck at the next model or 2 down. Try to get ram that can match the Front side bus of your processor if possible. Faster ram is better than more ram for gaming. So better to have 2GB of super fast, low latency, dual channel ram from a company like Corsair than have 4GB of standard/slow ram. For video/image editing huge files more ram may be more important than speed.