Well, I did not read that message in time ? I bought everything from NewEgg, because they have the best prices I could find and they seem to be popular amongst everyone I spoke to (except you)? I hope everything shows up fine! Everything I bought is under at least a 1-year warranty, though.
Anyway, specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 (duel-core, 64-bit) 3800+ -- This seemed to be very well-liked, and a few rungs below top-of-the-line, to where the prices start converging. I read a million reviews on different sites, and people seem to like this processor a lot. This was around $300 (a bit more than I wanted to pay).
The motherboard was the best I could find for around $100 ? not multi-processor, but it supports higher speeds than my processor and RAM will be, so it will at least cover me for now, for deh cheap. It also got many good reviews.
I got a set of two 1GB DDR400 RAM? pretty standard stuff, I went with the best-reviewed/rated, and made sure it had a heat dissipater (I have never seen that before? but it sounds good, anyhow). $100? maybe a bit much, but I wanted reliable stuff.
I bought a neat looking ATX server case (racks sound awesome-groovy, but I do not have the room for it). It is plenty big, and came chalk-full of fans ? 8 in total, I think? It was about $100. They are all LED-lit, and it has several hundred good reviews and a 550W PS ? I might replace the PS with something better later, but I do not plan to OC my system for quite a while. I do not care about the LED lights and fancy stuff, but it was the best combination of cooling power, PS, reviews, and price I could find. I know it is a bit expensive for a case, but I compared to buying the case + fans + PS separately, and it would come out to the same, so I figured I might as well have pretty LED fans, if it will cost me that much anyway ? oh, and the PS is even see-through, which is a first to me. Oh yeah, and the other feature I love is all the ports in front ? something a lot of the cheaper large cases did not even have, and the lit temp display.
I bought a 250GB SATA HD with 16MB cache for $100ish. I do not need that much space, but it was the fastest HD I could find that was not overkill, and I remember spending much more for much slower HDs years ago? I guess they have really gone down in price. Western Digital, I believe? I?ve heard of them, and, again, it got a lot of good reviews. Has all kinds of fancy features I don?t remember and probably don?t care about.
I also bought the best-reviewed reasonably-priced video card I could find on the net? at least as far as I could tell. It is an eVGA GF 6800+ ? 256MB RAM. Supposed to be good, with a company that has great support. This was $250 or so?
I don?t remember all the prices, but it came out to just over a $1,200 by the time I bought a bunch of other miscellaneous crap, add tax (I?m in CA
) + shipping, and it came to $1,270. By far, the most I have spent on anything in my life, save for my car (which was $1,300).