Power Efficient Gaming PC

[kar]

I've done a bit of a search and I haven't quite found much on the sort of PC build I'm after. So please forgive me for starting a new thread.

Basically these days I use my PC for work far more than gaming. And I don't think that's likely to change going forward. So my current desktop E8400, EVGA 5870, 6 gig of ram with a million fans and 800w corsair power supply is perhaps overpowered even for what I use it for now.

What I was thinking, is I still want a system I can play games on, mostly starcraft 2, with a little bit of teamfortress and probably battlefield 3. But in the main I'm going to be using the computer for software development and I want to be able to run mac osx (osx86 project) on it if possible. Or failing that, a flavour of Linux.

What I want is a workstation that doesn't suck up excess power and is generally pretty quiet. I want a case that is 'professional' looking. I'm quite keen on the Corsair 650 series (although I've heard they are loud).

So things that are important to me in order of importance
1. High Performance per watt
2. Lots of ram
3. Excellent virtualisation performance
4. Good to very good gaming performance
5. Quiet
6. Attractive, 'professional/classy' looking case

I was thinking of waiting for the Ivy Bridge platform as that seems to be ideal in terms of power consumption for performance. But where I am getting tripped up, is what to do about Graphics. Integrated just wont cut it. But having a top of the line AMD/Nvidia graphics card is overkill as well. I need to balance the fact I'll be more likely to be writing gamecode with this PC than playing games on it.

To put things into context, I'm half considering a Mac Mini, or a 15" Mac Book Pro and ditching a desktop altogether. But I would rather not be extorted by Apple.

Any tips or advice on what to look for, or alternatives to consider?

Cheers for any help!

One last point to make, is price is not really a factor here (within reason, I wouldn't spend > 4k for example even if the system was perfect).

 

[kar]

couple of questions:

what is your budget? i have a couple of ideas on where to go with this, but a lot of it depends on the budget

do any of your programs take advantage of cuda cores in Nvidia graphics cards? the reason i ask is that the higher end Nvidia graphics cards use up a lot more power for their returns, but if this power allows you to use the cuda cores then its totally worth it.
its probably best to do a check on each program you use because this is something i dont know much about (i know that it gives some programs a massive performance boost, but thats about it)

Thanks for all the tips.

I don't think anything I would do day to day would require Cuda extremely. Unless virtual machines somehow suddenly started leveraging them in some fashion.

In terms of budget, I was in my head thinking around 2k. But if the machine was absolutely perfect and could tick all my boxes I wouldn't lose too much sleep pushing up to 4k. My missus would get very upset if I spent any more than that though...