Ars Technica gives their recommendations for those who want to get the most bang for a lot, some, and a little money Check out their recommendations for the God Box ($10k ), the HotRod ($1.5k), and the budget setup ($700). Great reading even if you only wanna dream

http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/index.html

Oh my! Reminds me of alienware. *drools* I would take that god box anyday. Most of the chunk of that is coming from the dual 20' lcd's and scsi's. But what do ya expect?

I could use the god box to play the solitaire

Updated 10/5/2003, just in time for Christmas shopping

http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/index.html

Updated today 12-1-2003:

http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/index.html



I was looking at the old guide this weekend, good thing I didn't buy any pieces, some recommendations have changed

Does anyone know of another site that does this? I need to build/buy a computer for home use and ars is a little slow updating their recommendations

I have people all the time asking me for recommendations... I should probably actually spec out some boxes and post them on my website, but I'm lazy/busy

We're in the process of building a new computer for my wife... Specs:

Clear case with blue tint (4 5 1/4 bays, 2 3 1/2 bays, 5 internal hard drive bays).
450wat power supply.
DVD Drive, CDRW Drive, Zip100 Internal drive, 120gb HD
5 LED case fan's, 5 grill covers for them all.
3GB ram (when we have the cash to buy it, DDR333).
AMD Athlon 3200+

We're going with an ASUS motherboard, out only pre-requisite is that it has onboard RAID (the one we got our first trip didn't so we have to go back and exchange mobo's).

Total cost of this beast will be about $1500 give or take.. We had a few parts on hand but so far we've only spent $300... We're most likely going to spend $500 on just a few more hard drives...

Sharky Extreme has an monthly/bi-monthly computer purchasing guide, as does Anandtech . Anandtech covers all the bases, but Shrky is nice and streamlined info. It will make buying a 1k, 2.5k or 4k computer very easy.

I prefer to build my PC's, gives one more experiance with things and you can customize just about every aspect of your computer... Plus if something doesn't work it's your own fault :x...

Hey, thanks

/me wishes that PCI-Express motherboards and graphics cards were on the market already!

When do you think we'll start seeing them? Might be a good idea for me to wait if they're coming in the next 6 months or so

If you don't already know about it, one of the best objective websites out there for recommendations and reviews of products is http://www.tomshardware.com.

They have all the charts, graphs, and comparisons you need to make informed computer purchasing decisions. Not to mention they also do some pretty cool hardware tricks and show you how to do them too.

Well worth bookmarking that one for future reference.

PCI Express boards and graphics cards should be on the market in time for christmas. There are already a few motherboards here and there but I would stay away from them as they don't follow the full standard and won't perform as well.

hmm.. ok. I probably need to purchase one this fall, but I guess I could wait to get it as a Christmas gift Thanks

Thanks for the toms hardware link gator, much appreciated

The 3 main categories were finally updated

http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/index.html

They've updated their site to add suggestions for the "Ultimate Gaming Box"

http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/gaming-ultimate.html

nav, he specified a computer