[Masonite]

i would quote r0nin89, but his post is a bit too long. i'll skip my experience with computers to save you a few minutes of reading. i agree whole-heartedly with r0nin89 on a lot of things, and i urge you to take these into consideration:

-power supply, go antec or thermaltake, accept no others.

-hard drive, save yourself the hassle of replacing your seagate a year from now and stick with the Western Digital that he recommended. all my drives are WD. i wouldn't have it any other way, all from experience.

-CPU, personally, i'm an Intel fan. AMD is literally a copycat off Intel. Honestly, you could go either way, BUT, I've found that in most cases, if you have an Intel Processor, you use NVidia graphics cards, and if you have an AMD processor, you go with ATI. That just seems to be the preference for a lot of people.

-Kingston RAM is pretty good. If you decide to change and go with OCZ, I would stay away from their "gold" series--I've returned three sets of modules to them in the past year. Their SLI RAM is great, though. As r0nin said, don't go over 4gb of RAM if you're sticking with a 32-bit operating system.

-motherboard, Gigabyte is good. Asus is better. Both are dependable, though.

-case, i've bought that specific case before for a customer of mine. nice, little, solid case. however, the fan that comes with it sucks. get more fans. think about getting a CPU heatsink, too! thermaltake or zalman ftw.



overall, remember the most important thing: Your computer will only run as fast as its slowest component. if it means putting in $10 more for that little bit of extra reliability or speed, do it, unless you plan on building a custom computer for yourself every 2 months (because that's how long it will be before it's "obsolete", if not sooner).