Tigersdirect and newegg are the best 2 sites!

 

thx everyone for all the advice. lets just say i have a lot of research to do.

 

If you still need someone to build a tower for you because you end up not having sufficient time to do it your self, shoot me a pm. I have built several towers for clients in the past. Ill give you a free consultation and we can figure out specifically what your computer needs are and see how much we can save, add on, etc. Also, Iclub discount

 

k i will probably get a hold of someone once i get an idea of what i need/want

 

If you want guides on everything. Go to tomshardware.com. They got everything from building a PC, to forums where the super nerdy dudes take your $$ limit, and try to push out the best for it. They are also very knowledgeable on anything that has to do with a computer. Gaming/multimedia/office builds, etc. check their forums out and just read around.

 

Oh hey, funny thing is I actually have 2 picked them both up for 175/ea with each having a $50rebate on them so each down to $125 lol - slickdeals is the **** to say the least.

Very tempted to do a new build with a nice 890 chipset, absolutely love the value you can get with an AMD system. Also tempted to use an older board which could accept some nice low latency PC2-6400 I have from when it was essentially free.

It's a sickness, the problem is I'm not a heavy gamer or graphic artist, so it would be a bit extreme of a build for my needs. I have a nice $600 Dual-core Intel set-up that is more then adequate. Could always do some water-cooled OCing with the kits I have.

To OP: As you can see there are plenty of people willing to help! I would focus on value so you can stretch out those dollars as far a possible to help in your future-proofing endeavor.

 

Finished building my computer. Just tweakin it to overclock

ASROCk M3A770DE Motherboard
AMD Athlon II X3 3.0 (unlocked to Phenom II 940 X4 @ 3.0atm)
CoolMaster Hyper 212+
Antec Earthwatt 650 PSU Rated 80+
G.Skill Ripjaws 4GB RAM 1600 CAS 7
XFX ATI Radeon 5770
Sony DVD RW 24X
ASUS 23inch 2ms 1980-1200 Monitor
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (Important that this isn't .11; those have errors and become a paperweight)
Windows 7 64bit Ultimate Edition

Anywho, decent system. I'm sure you can be good makin' a sub 1500 if not sub 1000 system.

 

How many HDDs and what size?

*edit: had a stray number four in there as a typo

 

Stick AMD, AM3 is still alive, whereas the sockets for i5's are going out, i7's are steeply priced and don't offer all the best in gaming, you can still have the best in gaming while cutting costs. Video card is where it's at:

-AMD Phenom x4 955/965 out performs i5s, not too expensive either
-CoolMaster Hyper 212+ (still a great cooler, if you want somethin' else, look at the top 10 for AMDs, definitely see OCing at least 800-1k hertz if not more)
-Radeon 5870 ( 300-400dollar GPU, XFX, Sapphire are great brands for customer service)
-Samsung F3 7200 RPM HDD (Just a great drive, cheap cost)
-Ripjaws 4-6GB Pi edition CAS 7
-Cheap DVD RW, all of them range between 20-30 bux.
-Motherboard depends on what you want, reliability but with some price are gigabytes and asus.

 

I only went with 1 HD, didn't want to RAID or anything.

500GB drives are only 55 bux, that's a damn steal! Sata 3.0 I believe, new boards are rollin in with Sata speeds of 6.0.