[yojoe600]

newegg has always been cheaper to me than tigerdirect

[Whiskey11]

Originally Posted by yojoe600 newegg has always been cheaper to me than tigerdirect

THIS! Same, Tiger has a lot of the more obscure parts but isnt my top choice by any stretch. Best thing to do is comparison shop between Newegg and Tiger.

Ehm... I'll give you my list of parts I lean towards
-CASE: APEX (Used to be ASPIRE) Decent stock power supply, I replaced mine with a CompUSA special and havent had issues in the 3+ years this comp has been running.

-MOBO: ASUS, ASUS, and only ASUS. Dont ask why, I hate their BIOS and I hate their driver support (or lack thereof) but it still seems better than any other company and once I get the box up and running the damn thing runs smooth as glass.

-MEM: Corsair, Corsair, or Crucial. I chose Corsair for gaming rigs, crucial for anything else. Corsair is cheap, fast and runs like the dickens for a long time. Again 3+ years on the same 2gigs!

-PROC: I personally like AMD. I will admit I'm not up to snuff on computer hardware as I was in highschool when I had nothing better to do, so that may be dated, but AMD's have always ran well and treated me well.

-VIDCRD: ATI fan myself, but switched to Nvidia after the 8800 GTX came out and smacked ATI in the face. Havent had issues with either concerning graphics quality (other than excellent) The switch the 8800 GTS (640mb version) was promted by the fact I wanted to go SLI in the future with the card, and ATI's Crossfire sucks.

-HARDDrives: Smaller and more is better than one big one. (IMO ) 2 160gigs over a 320gig any day. Stick to Memorex, Western Digital or Seagate. I'm a Raptor only user and they are worth the price, but again, dont go out and buy the largest HD you can find, that leads to headaches in the future when the entire HD craps out and you lose everything. At least with two seperate harddrives you dont lose everything.

DVD/CD Drives: Memorex, cheap fast and reliable. Exceeds my needs and gets the job done without much complaint. My 3+ year old DVD drive went out a month ago, replaced it and off I go again

SOUND: Meh, there isnt a single sound card out there I'd recommend, I've been in the Creative's X-fi and Audigy cards for a long time, Vista drivers still suck balls but like the mobo, after the headache everything works great. If you must get a sound card a basic Sound Blaster should exceed. I hate onboard sound too but I'm picky

CPU Cooler: Zalman, buy one, dont look back. Bought a Zalman 2 years ago for my CPU and it's ice chilly. Overclocking gooooood and still cold as ice. Like Zippie said, a CPU cooler is essential, and stock ones are ok, but a Zalman exceeds!

Get yourself some Fan filters for your external fans too to keep dust and crap out of the case, remember to balance your fans (equal number blowing in as blowing out, nohomo) and clean up the wires so they are not hanging everywhere and you should be good to go! Everythign is basically plug and play, only time I had to break out the MoBo manual is for front case controls on the MOBO pins, everything else was self explanatory.

[Dennis]

i agree with most of that. you can find deals on tiger all the time for 1TB hdd for less then 100 bucks so why not buy 2 lol. im amd all the way. have been sense i can remember.

[Notcho]

Whiskey11 pretty much said it all there.. WD and Seagate are probably my choice when it comes to hard drives. I have had lots of problems with Maxtor, and I try to steer clear of them.

Every Samsung CD/DVD drive I have had went out within 1 year of using it. About 3 years ago I went to Wal-Mart and bought a Lite-On DVD+-RW DL for $49, and it has been working great ever since, not so much as a single problem with it.

I used to run Thermaltake for CPU coolers, but they are overrated. Zalman is good, and quiet too. Proper CPU cooling = long life, so spend the extra money and get a good one. The CPU heatsink/fans that come with the CPU are hardly adequate, so plan on buying a decent one. You can't go overboard here.

As far as case fans go, general rule of thumb is 1 intake fan to 2 exhaust fans. Seriously, if you have fans pushing hot air out, cool air is going to find its way in. Main idea is to get hot air out of the case. On one of my cases, I took a roto-zip and cut a 80mm hole in the top of the case and put a 80mm case fan for exhaust. It made a HUGE difference in case temp, and since heat rises, the top of the case is the best place for an exhaust fan. Also check your power supply to make sure its blowing air out of the back, and not pulling air into the case. Once I had a power supply that had the fan in backward, blowing hot air into the case. I took it apart and turned the fan around, big difference.

As far as RAM, I usually go with Kingston. Just personal preference here; I have always had good luck with them. They have lifetime warranty like most others, but I have never needed to return any. I used to run PNY, which also has a lifetime warranty, but after I returned a couple of them, I went to Kingston.

For motherboards, I prefer MSI. I used to like Asus, but I had a few problems with those. Just about every one I had would hang on boot, due to an overclock failsafe if the computer had been unplugged. I wasn't even overclocking. I would have to reconfigure the BIOS every time.. It got a little old.

As far as sound goes, Im not too picky. I'll use the onboard sound. Most of them now are capable of splitting the sound into 5.1 if you want. The MSI boards I had came with SPDIF as well.

For video cards, I started out with 3Dfx. Anyone who has been with PCs long enough knows who they are; they were a major competitor with ATI and nVidia, and ultimately nVidia bought 'em out to kill the competition. After that I ran nVidia. The only complaint I had with them was every time they released new drivers, they made my card run slower and slower. If I put the old drivers back on, it would run great again. Just seemed a little strange to me. After that, I ran an ATI 9800 Pro. Now this laptop I am using has an ATI chipset. nVidia probably has the market now as far as the most bad ass, but I don't keep up with it nearly as much as I did in high school.

[RavensChild]

Building is fairly simple if you just read up on it a little bit. A computer is pretty much plug and play if you know what your doing. I always planned on building one but i never really felt like spending the money for it and such because i wanted to build one badass gaming rig that was alittle over 1k and then with software was too much for me. So i just slightly upgraded my 10 year old desktop. I upgraded the ram from 256 to 1gb, the video card from 16 to 64, and threw in an extra hard drive i had laying around. The processor is only a 1.3 amd haha.

i just picked up my new laptop on saturday to be my replacement and for a graduation gift for college. It is a Gateway. 2.26ghz intel centrino 2. 4gb of DDR3 (runs twice as fast as ddr2) and an nVidia GeForce 9800m gts 1gddr3 card that is sick. The system is a beast and i love it. Cost=1,149

and if you need any help with picking out parts and everything you know that you can trust everyone here to pick it out and probably a few guys that would build it for you and ship it if you didnt want to actually build it yourself

[Fluffy The Rhino]

You can build a fairly decent setup with $1k. I built a new one last year... went with an ASUS motherboard (never had a problem with Asus). Gigabit motherboards are horrid... don't buy one of them. Last one I got wouldn't work. AT ALL. Don't go cheap on RAM (you can get GOOD RAM for a good price). I went with 4 GB of OCZ RAM (also came with heatsinks on the chips). Stay away from Seagate SATA hard drives. They've been having some nasty problems lately with firmware. Western digital is a good brand. I just picked up an internal WD hard drive last weekend for $100. I run a 500 GB primary drive, and a 1 TB storage drive. If you're going to store anything, either get two internal drives or one internal and external. Nothing sucks more than losing a few hundred thousand MP3s. If you go with an AMD processor, specifically a quad core, make sure it's a black edition. The quad processors that came out before that had problems and one of the cores would dump out and you'd be left with a tricore processor. It was fixed with the black edition. I'm not a fanboy when it comes to processors. 3 of my laptops are pentiums, and one is an AMD. I also have a small dell desktop CPU running a Pentium. My server is an AMD. Haven't had any processor-related problems with any of them. Ever. Both companies make good processors for the most part, and with ANYTHING you buy, there's always a chance of something failing. IF you build it yourself, make sure you use the right amount of thermal paste on the processor. Arctic Silver is a good brand... but I haven't had issues with anything else. Since you won't be using it for gaming, I'd stick with an inexpensive video card with a heatsink on it... NO FAN. EVERY single video card I've purchased with a fan on it over the past 9 years has failed due to the fan burning out, causing the card to overheat and die. They've all lasted less than a year. The cards I buy that don't have fans on them last a hell of a lot longer. As for cases... Thermaltake makes some good, solid cases. Well, at least they used to. I've been using a case (Not a Thermaltake, as I gave the last server to a friend) for the past 7 or 8 years that I bought at 3dcool.com. I don't know if the site is still around. Don't skimp on a power supply. The more powerful the setup, the more power it's going to eat. It's good to leave room for expansion. Your CD/DVD drive (and possibly burner) isn't that big of a deal. They're fairly cheap, so if it breaks, you can just go out and get another. I've been running the same pioneer DVD burner since 2003, and haven't cleaned it out once.