YerK wrote:I think it's smart that you're getting it all from the same place. That way, you don't wind up with two companies telling you that a problem you're having is from the other company's part. You might want to see if they will assemble it for you, too. That might cure any issues about hardware incompatibility. I don't know any of the specific hardware enough any more to make recommendations, though. I used to read about graphics cards, but I just stopped once I got married. (Priorities changed)
I buy my PC components exclusively from Newegg--their customer service and shipping are excellent.
As for the actual assembly--that's simple, believe it or not. You do ALOT of research before buying so you make sure everything's compatible, and when the parts show up you just snap/screw/plug them together. I was nervous as hell about my first build, but after 4 hours with a couple of small hand tools I went from a pile of parts to a functioning machine waiting for me to install an OS, and I saved almost a $1000 dollars doing it myself. Yea, a THOUSAND, a 1 with 3 zeros after it. I priced a PC similar to what I built by hand from Dell and Gateway and that's how much more they wanted to put it together for me.
Here's a good example. The compnents above would cost me $1700 or thereabouts with shipping.....here's a base model Alienware from Dell...
http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-auro ... alx&~ck=mn
Now keep in mind that $2400 base model is still not the equal of what I'm building....the processor is slower, and the video card is a lower level model as well. I got about halfway through "personalizing" it to make it the equal of what I was building and ended up at $3000....DOUBLE what I'm paying to build my own.
Back on topic.....turns out after doing some reading I was completely misunderstanding how RAID 0 worked.....I thought it was a simple "plug 4 HD's together and they'll be 4x as fast" but it looks like it doesn't do much other then make your OS boot faster. From a gaming perspective it's completely pointless.
Think I'm going with this one.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136296