I built all my own computers for years. Recently, however, I've gone with Dell. Unless you're going to be building with bleeding edge technology, you can't touch the prices of the big guys. The last one, I priced out the components, and only saved about $50 over the same thing from Dell. And that doesn't include the hassle of ordering from 5 different places, assembling the whole mess and then installing the OS. Having done it a zillion times for me, family and friends, I'll spend the 50 bucks and call it a day.