As I waste money on buying books for my PhD, I've stopped upgrading my computer, to the point where I fear it will no longer support Max Spec on the freshly released games.

So, flood me with information:
WHAT IS THE TOP SPEC for a gaming rig this year??

What is the fastest, meanest setup you can buy in the 2nd half of 2004, that will blow the [graphic] socks off your colleagues and hanlde DOOM3, HL2, AAO on maximum settings, and STILL have enough "umph" to let you watch a Start Trek movie on the second monitor....

You probably want a ATI Radeon X800 graphics card, if you want to be realistic. If you want to go all out, I would have to recommend an ATI FireGL X2-256t or NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000. We are using a Quadro FX in my lab (a slightly weaker version). Those cards may cost you up to, maybe even more than, $1000. But they are really powerful.

Radeon X800/GeForce 6800 (Ultra or not it's pretty awesome -you don't necessarily need 256mb ram on a video card yet though, so if you get the option, go for 128mb and save your cash) are the top graphics cards, although personally I'd go for a Radeon 9800 or an FX 5900/5950.
CPU, anything between 3 and 4 ghz is suitably impressive...
RAM, 1gb is perfectly sufficient, but some people are already going for 2gb.
Audigy 2 is still the soundcard of choice, and more important for shooters than a good videocard imo.

Why not Ati Radeon 9600 PRO 128mb.

my pc is just over 2 years old this august, and other than a cpu upgrade and graphics upgrade (i accidently fried both of em) it will run doom on the medium spec levels.
got me a 3gig AMD, GeForce 6800 ultra, 3.5 gig of 333 ddr ram (fastest on the market 2 years ago, and thats the mobo maxed out),4x 200 gig 10,000rpm with 4 or 8mb cache (whatever thats about... but who cares they got blistering seek speeds), A-bit ddr mobo with 4 ide slots (dont know and dont care what else it got), cd burner and dvd rom ( not high spec, but 4 what i want they do the job). 5.1 optical output Trust audio card, sod the pc speakes, optic into my 350 watt p/channel 7.1 Bang & Oloufsen amp with 1x 8" active sub (for kicky bass) and 1x 14" active sub (for heavy long bass)

and an alcohol cpu cooling system, was originally water, but it was no where near as efficiant as it said it was so i modified it to 95% clinical alcohol and sealed it, and the AMD dont get hotter than 28degs when im hammering it

[edit]
Almost forgot, a Trust 600 UPS, gives me about 35 mins with my standard 13" monitor, and 20 mins with my 21" tft...

I wanna get my gruby little hands on one of the tri pannel ttf monitors, Damn they look good!
[/edit]

I saw those tri-panel thingys on a web advert somewhere--they remind me of the plasma screens that often accompany Cray mainframes...

I'm still stuck on a GeForce Ti4200 64meg--I think I'm gonna wait until the next gen cards come out with 512 meg DDR and more crunch power than the average rig.