this is some good advice guys - and the shopping aroudn part that I'm doing, I always make sure they have free shipping, so that doesn't hurt me.
As far as Intel and not AMD. I've always been an AMD guy, but AMD also has been keeping up and surpassing, somethings, Intel, but right now, the new FSB interconnect technology is my must have. I've never had a compy with higher than 333 FSB speeds, and I reallly wanna try a 1600MHz FSB compy.
I'm actually gonna have a small (30GB) SSD for the operating system to work on, and a larger 750GB HD 7200 rpm on the side, or 300GB 10k rpm
I plan to do light overclocking to get the 2.6GHz proc up to the 3.X+ range.
A lot of my review serches do actually end up on Tomshardware.com, I used to actually used Hard OCP as my review site ever since my first build, probably back in '98
UPDATE: I threw some more info on the first post as I decide on what I want. I'm using it as a working note pad. I think my hardest decision will come down to GPU and MOBO. I've always loved NVidia, and every review I've read seems to be swayed with bias, like only Radeon, or only NVIDIA.
EVGA nVidia GeForce 275 Superclocked – 896MB GDDR3, PCI Express 2.0 seems like an option for around 300
Read more:
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/h...#ixzz0ZVugrOVc