I'm building a computer. What should I put in it to make it amazing?

If you spend that much money, you will get very little return for the last $1000. But, do it if you wish. Start here.

Top end Antec case – any one will do, very quiet fans, good cooling
1000 w Corsair power supply
Asus P6T mobo – X58 chipset
i7 930
Zalman CNPS10X – very quiet cooler
12 gb Corsair DDR-3 RAM
Samsung DVD rw
Western digital black HD (must be black), 1 tb, get two, or four, you have the $
GTX 470 video card – Since you have the money, get two. Whatever card you get, be sure the ram is DDR-5
windows 7
You’ll have money left over, spend it on a faster connection to the web

I’d concur with @UScitizen on all except the Western Digital hard drives. Too many of them have crapped out on me for me to give them my seal of approval. Hitachi or Seagate are the brands I’d go with. They’re only about $80 each for a 1TB internal drive.

One of my Hitachis has lasted me since 2002, bless.

@aprilsimnel Are you familiar with the WD line of Black drives. WD finally got it right with the Black line. Hitachi is good. Seagate used to be good, alas, no more. What Seagate is turning out now is not reliable. Two to three years ago I bought 9 seagate drives. Eight have gone to heaven. And yes, they were all very well cooled.

Another very important consideration is where you get the components. Shop carefully. A very good search engine for price comparison is:
http://www.pricewatch.com/
Currently, I’ve found both Newegg and eWiz Superbiz to be very reliable suppliers with good customer service. Tiger Direct has fast shipping, but will screw you in a flash on a rebate. I will never again buy anything from Tiger Direct that has a rebate. They have lied to me twice about not having the proper assemblage with the rebate request.

@UScitizen got a good start but I’d tweak a few things.
-I’d go for the I7 875K processor instead, it’s faster than the 930, and it’s unlocked for easy overclocking. It’s just a little more expensive and well worth it.
-The Zalman’s a good cooler, but you can get a good deal on liquid coolers now like the Asetek 510LC, which is a sealed no-maintenance system, very quiet, and more efficient.
-Instead of the Samsung DVD r/w unit, I’d go with an HP bd240i, which will also add Blu-ray playback and Lightscribe printing.

I defer to others above for detailed specs & product recommendations.

Your question, however, asks not just about high performance but also ”something that will last me a long time”. Given the resilience of Moore’s Law over several decades now, I’d say that “a long time” is at best 3–5 years, after which your computer will be ordinary rather than amazing. After 7–10 years it will inevitably be junk.

Just something to consider before sinking a lot of money into this project…
Good luck & enjoy !

@gasman I’m not so sure. If you skimp then that is definitely true, but I had a top-of-the-line P4 system made in 2004 (I got it in 2007 when my buddy upgraded) that held it’s own against Core2 Duos in real-world and gaming until recently.
You are correct that “a long time” is closer to 5–6 years, but that’s a hell of a lot longer than the 2 years you get from spending half as much. The real trick is to figure out where the point of diminishing returns is.

That said, I went with a $500 Core i3–530 and a $100 GT240 partly because I don’t need a supercomputer and partly because it has enough headroom that, in a couple of years, I can swap in an i7–875K to more than double the CPU power for less than the cost of replacing the entire computer. It meets my need now and can be upgraded later, and I am out far less than I would be if I went for a $15K dual-Xeon rig like Maximum PC did for Dream Machine 2010

@GeorgeGee I concur: the 875K is a better chip, if for no reason other than it is unlocked. Slap on a radiator and water pump and you can crank that baby past any locked chip with ease not that it’s too shabby even at stock speeds.

Personally, I’d go with an AMD processor. Intel’s Core i7 processors are REALLY expensive and don’t give you that much more of a speed boost. You’d be better off buying a 3.6 gHZ AMD Phenom II X4 for around $200 than the Core i7 for $900. Check out the benchmarks at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-phenom-ii,2119.html. Tom’s Hardware is talking about overclocking, but I think this gets the point across pretty well. The i7 will cost you way more and only give you slightly better performance – it’s just not worth the money.

For the HD the only choice is a samsung F3 1Tb.

For the C:\ drive, SSD is the only way.

For storage, I agree that the terabyte (or multi-terabyte) drives are ideal, but if you want to game and just get the map loaded quicker than anyone else, a couple of SSDs in RAID 0 are what you need. I would never go back to moving media for my OS/games drive.

Money is no object, right? If it feels right to spend $18k on drives the are faster than most RAM, do it. LOL

Realistically, something like two of this drive in RAID 0 will make your PC run sweeter than you think, and still allow you space for a couple of games where speed is critical. If you have more money, go for bigger drives.

All the above.
But most importantly, yourself.

@camertron Maybe, but I wish to point out that the i7–875K has a street price closer to $320,if notably faster than the i7–920 in your link, and actually has almost a 10% lead over the $296 Phenom II x6 1090T (the highest rated AMD chip in this chart) so AMD isn’t always the better deal.
They used to hold that status with an iron grip, and I sincerely hope that one day they make a major comeback and we return to the heyday of AMD chips outperforming more expensive Intel chips (yes, I am a fan of AMD) but the simple truth is that right now, Intel has some better chips.

@the100thmonkey If money were no object, I’d have an external RAID full of a few TB worth of SSDs and forgo the whole platter and read head deal

@camertron Seven days ago I purchased an i7 930 for $199.99 at microcenter. It was the retail package, with the intel cpu cooler, which will go in the trash. But, I agree with you. We must always shop for value. I have used AMD processors for many years, when they were the best bang for the buck.

@GeorgeGee Asetek 510LC nice cooler. Thanks for the point. It adds some clutter to the box. But, in one of my applications it might be better than dumping the heat inside the box.

@UScitizen IMO, unless it causes condensation or sounds like a jet engine, you really can’t have too much cooling, especially not with an unlocked CPU.

@jerv you can’t compare 1156(ie 870) i7’s with 1336 (ie 920) i7’s. The 1336 socket has a bigger memory and PCIe bus so while the core CPU speed is faster with your 875 a system built on a 1336 will out perform it in the real world as the system will be able to get data to and from the system faster.

Also while we’re at I think the i5 750 offers better value for money. It can be overclocked just as far as the i7 875K but costs half the price. The i7 does have hyper threading but as most day to day tasks will actually run slower with the HT on than without then it’s really not worth the cash.

@Lightlyseared True, a 1336 will eat an 1156 for lunch, but the point remains that the Phenom II x4 has nothing on the Core i7 performance-wise regardless of which socket it’s in. (The x6 maybe….)

To be honest, part of the reason I like the 875K is that I can use it without swapping my mobo out. And yes, the i5–750 is a marginally better value, but also only ⅔ the power. Even though HT slows some things down, I thing that the 875K has enough muscle to overcome that since the HT performance hit is more of a pothole than a roadblock.

If value is all that matters then AMD is better but part of the reason that they are so much cheaper is that they are a bit slower and not what I would call “amazing”. And while the i7–9xx series is a bit faster, they are nowhere near as good a value as the 8xx-series. Until the price gap narrows a bit, I don’t feel that the higher bus speeds are not worth the price premium unless you are going for a budget-be-damned Tower of Power, in which case I would go with Xeons. Maybe next year when prices drop, but not right now.

You aren’t wrong though, since there is more than one correct answer here. All I’m saying is that you and I don’t agree on the best path.

One thing we apparently do agree on is that Apple charges cutting-edge prices for last year’s specs, locks their stuff down, and is generally not a wise choice unless you have more dollars than sense.

@jerv no one sane buys an unlocked cpu and then runs it at stock speeds. If you are going to overclock then which chip you buy doesn’t matter as they both easily hit 4Ghz on air (assuming you’ve updated the cooler as well). If you just want the fastest stock chip then buy the 870 and save your self £50.

@Lightlyseared I was under the impression that an unlocked chip that is faster to begin with could be overclocked to be faster than an unlocked chip that starts out slower. Or are you saying that the i5–750 has enough headroom to beat an overclocked i7–875K?
Aside from that little miscommunication, I agree.

@jerv – an unlocked chip with a higher stock clock speed will probably overclock faster than one with a lower stock speed. However, in my experience, the lower clocked chips provide a better bang/buck ratio as the increase in clock speed through overclock will be proportionally larger.

Remember the s939 Venice 3200+ Athlon 64s? Those babies were amazing – 1.8GHz to 2.6–3.0 GHz easily! They were as cheap as chips too.

I don’t want to discuss the Opterons as I’ll start dribbling nostalgically…

@the100thmonkey The old XP 1700+ also had a pretty decent amount of headroom as well; 1466 MHz to ~2.2 GHz. The P4 1.8A was another nice one; 1.8 GHz to around 3GHz. However, having that much headroom is rather uncommon, especially on air-cooling. Today’s chips seem to be closer to 30–35% than to 50% like those two.

As for lower clocked chips being a better bang for the buck, things get slightly more complex when comparing different processors like the i5 and i7. That is why I don’t completely disagree with @Lightlyseared. Finding that sweet spot of price and performance is more of an art than a science, and I’ve seen the i5–750 get quite a few honorable mentions from people who don’t mind ponying up a little more for the i7–875K since the performance gap is roughly the same as the price gap.

@lloydbird it looks as if you are correct – Intel chips are better these days. My previous response was based off of that Tom’s Hardware site, which I think is a couple years old. I also looked on Newegg for prices for the processors I mentioned, so those are current and accurate. I guess I still don’t see the need to buy a CPU for $900.

@UScitizen It’s incredible you found an i7 930 for as little as that – Newegg has them listed for $289 (which is still lower than I initially remembered). What is a “microcenter” by the way?

@camertron Quite credible. As of 2010–08-03, still $199.99
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0331303