New Computer Build!

Buying by brand is akin to voting straight ticket IMO. Research every buy individually. Any company can fuck you over eventually.

If you don't mind used parts and having some patience you can get some amazing deals on Ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Ultimate-Gaming-...#ht_500wt_1154
For instance.

Now what I ended up doing was buying my case that already had 3.4ghz dual core processor, a 500gHD, dvd burn drive, and 4 ram slots. Then I bought a used Nvidia card. This thing is a beast! It's probably a cycle or two behind the new cards but I read old reviews on it first and got it on a great deal. I happened to luck into getting Vista right before Win7 came out, so I got Vista on the cheap, and they included a free upgrade for Win7. Found a good deal on a nice 23' flat screen and I'm set. I don't have all my specs now but I put it together a year ago. Set a nice gaming on the cheap for 500$.

Just gotta get on there every day and keep your eyes open. I got the operating system and more Ram off newegg.

Buying by brand is akin to voting straight ticket IMO. Research every buy individually. Any company can fuck you over eventually.

Agreed. I've just been buying from them throughout the AMD Duron days, even back when Thunderbird was around, lol. But they have always been consistently cheaper in most instances, and i've yet to recently find anything that would objectively say otherwise.

This guy breaks down the benchmarking pretty well and as far as I can tell 100% accurately.

In my attempts to stay frugal, the best time of year has finally come. Black Friay.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...7&sku=B69-0267

I think this has a definite possibility of getting ordered by me, as far as I can tell it's a pretty good deal and I haven't found much else out there that really compares, for the price.

What kind of graphics card are you gonna stick in that?

basically anything in a $70-100 range, nothing too fancy for now. Which will still get me easily within the range of the games I play, given that I hardly ever run anything 100% full out.

Intel's new flagship processor comes out january 5th. Ati's next Gen Radeons come out some time early next year too. AMD is releasing bulldozer hopefully sometime next year. Nvidia also just released not too long ago the GTX 500 series. Havn't really looked into it much though. Friend says its just minor improvements to their gtx 400 fermi's

I'd wait.