I only use home built as brand name systems stick you with junk parts. Sure it might be cheaper to not have heat sinks on and generic ram but you get what you pay for. I can upgrade my motherboard every few years and have a brand new system. You simply cannot do that with proprietary systems. The PC market is by no means like the server market where things are actually made to run properly either.
My current system is almost 7 years old and is just now being retired to run Age of Conan with max settings. Just over a year ago my machine got a new motherboard and new ram because my FPS in World of Warcraft was getting crappy. I was stuck at 4x AGP and the upgrade allowed me to increase the FSB which unlocked more power in my GPU. Believe it or not it was more expensive to buy a new video card which would have given less performance increase. Not only that it would have done nothing in terms of running programs faster and such.
My new baby below is currently in planning and im hoping to have it ready by monday.
Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition (might try Vista with dual boot config)
CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W SLI/Crossfire Certified Power Supply (single rail + great brand + big savings = no brainer)
RAIDMAX AZTEC ATX-619WU Mid Tower Computer Case (easy access is a big PLUS)
Motherboard (considering an nForce 780i or 790i SLI)
BFG Tech GeForce 8800 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 (will run two of these in SLI)
Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (need for speed)
Seagate Barracuda 750GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (going to need lots of porn to fill this)
ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler (might go with Cooler Master)
Rosewill RCR-FD200 Card Reader with 1.44MB Floppy Drive (floppy support)
Rosewill RCR-103 USB 2.0 Card Reader (more flash options are welcome)
Thermaltake BlacX USB & eSATA HDD Docking Station (remote data storage and archives)
Technology only gets this cheap when the market is slow and im taking advantage now.
