I am considering building a tower, instead of buying a notebook. If I were back home in Thai, I would take the bus to Pantip plaza, buy all the parts and KNOW I was getting the best prices anywhere on Earth, go home, stip down to socks and a nightie, and go to town, putting it together...

Here in the U.S it is a different story though...

Where is a good place for parts here? Is it ok to buy them all from a store, or should I go totally online, such as with Newegg?

Back home I could build a top of the line machine for about 500$ Is that still feasible overhere?

Any info or experiences you have, brand name preferences for parts, etc. would be just lovely!
Love-mimi

From what I have seen/heard, Newegg is indeed the best place to go amongst the savvy for parts to build a computer.

Hrm, Ok... Would it be to terribly bad if I went to a store to buy the parts?
Pricewise?

Brick and mortar stores that sell computer parts are generally overpriced around here. It's like trying to buy herbs off of an alchemist. It's worth more to them, since they typically get to charge labor on top of it all.

That having been said, you might try any ol' used computer store. Computer Renaissance is the biggest chain around. If you can't find one of those, just look in the phone book.

Do -not- buy a monitor or RAM online. Everything else should be fine. Monitors and RAM have a high rate of failure, and often online stores do not replace crappy batches.

Personally, I buy most of my products from MicroCenter and I stay away from Fry's as they tend to have more batches of broken equipment.

I use newegg a lot, mwave for my motherboards... I really wish my dad still went to Malaysia regularly, computer parts galore. Oh, if any of you are in these places of huge discounts on computer stuff, let me know, I want to see what it'd be like shipping from there.

Pricewatch.com.

So.. tempted to buy cheap video card and system RAM for no apparent reason.

Thanks for all the help, I am shopping for parts -RIGHT NOW- on the net, I got a few hours before my next class... The problem now is that I do not know what is "good" quality stuff over here. An exmaple: Acer is excellent quality back home, but they are new here, not sure how good their american stuff is.

Also things like... back home I always used ATX motherboards, just cause that is what was easily available from the store. I have no idea how an Nvidia GPU is different from an ATI, or which is better, don't know anything about RAM except the numbers... I'm doing some research now, but still it is like "well blah, nothing I want is avialable... got to find new brands I can trust..." Also, if something fails once, it is considered broken like... a few years ago Pantip Plaze (HUGE electronics store in Thai, biggest in SE Asia) got some Maxtor HDD's, they had prolems, now you can not buy a Maxtor at Pantip, and they will not order them for you either.

Lord Raezon, being from Thailand, yes I could get you the stuff you need, as Malaysia makes the parts FOR us (as we own their eternal souls and they have to pay us back for harboring the Jamah Islaamiiya and blowing up children's schools in the south, with awesome cheap computer parts). The main advantage to you, as shipping could be iffy depending (I reccomend DHL, they do good work), is you can get things 6-8 months before they come to the U.S, as Thailand is the concept testing ground for Asia (cars...etc, the new concept Nissan truck is UGLY AS SIN!! >_<)

Thanks for everything, everyone. Still working on this, I'll put up some links to some parts I like, and you could give me feedback maybe?
-Anymore hints and tips would be lovely!
Love-mimi

EDIT: Still not sure, after seeing these prices, if building one would be cheaper than buying one...hmm

Anyone have any preferences for CPU/GPU? I am looking at getting this Athlon 64 x2 4200, but having no experience with the dual core architecture (or even 64 bit CPU's...) Not sure on this, Consumer Reports and Newegg give it a nice ranking though...hm

EDIT2: From your experience, is it cheaper to buy the motherboard/cpu/memory as a bundle or seperatly?

Just to give you an idea, here's the computer I'm working on...

AMD Athlon 4200+ X2 proc (The processor depends on your use, if you do a lot of multi-tasking, get a dual core, if you don't and want it purely for gaming power, go for a single-core)

One of three motherboards, the Asus A8N-deluxe, the new Fatality one, or the DFI-Lan Party (mainly you're just deciding if you want to use dual graphics cards necessitating an SLI mobo)

The best card right now would the the 7900gt or 7900gtx, the 7900gt is a great buy simply because it provides nearly the same power as the 7800gtx for a fraction of the cost.

Ram is really just your personally preference, I was Hyper-X memory normally.

Ok, sofar, this is what I have found!
-Preliminary computer specs table thingy-

*Dvd/CdROM Drive- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16827151118
*Tower/Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16811119068
*CPU/Motherboard (I am assuming this is the MB also, as it is listed under Motherboard Bundles...)
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/shoppingcart.as...YSDWIG4VB3W6E22
*Memory
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16820211130
*GPU-
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...82E16814102434R
*Power Supply-
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817171007

Total Cost= 704$ Total Budget = ~700$ :'( hmm...looks like I'll have to wait a bit
-Motherboard bundle 419$
-Powersupply 35$
-Tower/Case 50$
-Cd/DVD 60$
-Memory 63$
-GPU 77$

Lord Raezon, I love the sound of that GPU but unless I can make some serious cutbacks, I'll have to wait on that, but I do not play alot of games... just Daiblo 2 Expasion, Broodwar, and Lusternia... hmm. I'll definitly be saving up for a better card though. How is this?

Motherboard isn't viewable, but otherwise it looks okay so far. If you do plan on upgrading the video card eventually though I'd just save up and spend $20 for that refurbished x1300 if your motherboard supports PCI-Express. It'll be more solid graphically in the long-run if you do decide to do some high-end gaming (Kind of weird that they have the same pixel pipeline size though).

Ewww... overclocked AMD FX60 > X2. Of course that, and everything that follows, is from the mind of a gamer and hardware phreak.

I would have said go with ASUS (A8NSLI preferably) and a Thermaltake mid Tower ATX. Add liquid cooling, and ask your local overclocking expert for some configuration advice. The bus rates on those boards are crazy.
Also, don't know much about AData RAM, but I would have said go with hypercondensed Corsair or Elixir RAM. The Coolermaster PSU and Samsung DVDROM should hold up like a tank though.

In a semi hijack, does anyone here have any familiarity with shuttle/cube microATX/server cases? I've been looking for a three (5.25in) bay shuttle case, and have had absolutely no luck, even with custom shops... any suggested manufacturers?

Additionally, for the VGA, I'm using an unbelievably cheap (20$) MSI card with 64mb onboard and supporting 256mb Turbocached. If you have memory to spare and want a cheap upgrade at some other point, check out the NX6200TC by MSI. It's kinda old, but I've had a most wonderful time with it so far.