Well I looked at reseller ratings.com and cyberpower is rated better than dell, I found that very strange because I had a great experience with dell, so based on the reviews on that site cyberpower isn't that bad then. Now I don't know if I will take the risk or build it myself.

I know this contradicts myself but I have several friends that have ordered from cyberpower and had no problem, so I was the unlucky one in the 3 of us. Like I said the pc is great but they did change my memory without telling me and then took forever to correct the problem and still haven't refunded my money. The best advice I can give you is to trust your gut.

Well, I ALWAYS build my PC's from parts. My preferences are a bit different to what any retailer will make.

* I like to have one smaller capacity, high speed HDD (last time round I used software RAID) for applications, and larger, slower ones for large file storage. This makes a HUGE difference to speed, w/o the compromise on storage capacity. (e.g. a striped RAID array of 2x10000rpm, 72gb hdd's for the OS, and a single 260gb hdd of some kind for files)

* I also prefer a smaller amount of higher speed RAM. My next PC will have

* I usually save money by buying a mid range processor. There is an extra markup
on higher speed ones.

* I keep an image of a base install of the OS'es seperately for reinstallation purposes, thus saving myself the hassel of dealing with "winrot" (windows stability slowly deteriorating due to viruses, spyware, dodgy updates, etc).

* I don't have to worry about bloatware.

* More choice of OS. In fact, I may just drop the HDD's from my current PC into a new load of hardware, battle with the drivers for a week or two, then take a new disk image and have the same machine with new guts.

* I saved myself 5% last time round over dell's most suitible offering.

* I guided my brother through the process of doing this, and he saved a packet too. Plus, he picked up some life skills. (and his machine glows red and blue. You don't get that with a Dell)

Most of the machines you get in the shops, and even the options you customise, are designed to have lots of bug numbers that don't add up to the best value for money. DIY saves you money, and gets you better value. I plan to do this again in a years time.

Quote: Original post by CircuitX
my Computer Science Professor told me that it will take long for programmers to take advantage of the 4 cores so I should stick with 2 cores for now.

The 360 has 3 hyper-threaded cores, which makes 6 virtual cores. The PS3 has 8!

Your prof might be right about regular application programmers, but he is dead wrong about programming for video-games - console programmers are already writing code for 6+ cores.
The revolution is now!

As far as your processor for your work goes, only you can really answer the question of 2 or 4 cores.

How are you doing your AI projects? Can you take advantage of multiple cores? The Q6600 will be a little slower on a single process than an E6750 stock, but if you can get all 4 cores to 90% load, the quad will blow the dual out of the water.

As for the case, what are your reasons for picking it? And what price are you paying for it? (Cases are a really hard thing to suggest and give advise about, as some people view them as a box to hold the computer, and others view them as a work of art to display, and people's views on art greatly differ. Myself like minimalistic style, so I went with an Antec P-180. Super quiet, and has great support for hard drives and fans. I honestly forget the number of hard drives it has space for, but I think it is 6 or 8. Oh, and the biggest thing, it has two removable air filters on the front intakes! I've had this computer for several months, and pull a massive amount of dust and hair from the filters every week, but I have yet to notice any kind of actual build up in the case itself.)

Quote: Original post by Talroth
I don't think I'll ever want anything too different from my Antec P-180. (the only drawback to my case is it is fricken huge! and heavy.)

Amen to that. Great case, but its a beast to haul around.

Quote:
Posted by speciesUnknown

Well, I ALWAYS build my PC's from parts. My preferences are a bit different to what any retailer will make.

It would be nice for me to build it myself but I need some advices on trusted websites from which I could buy the components for my PC at a reasonable price. I went to NewEgg and added the same components I listed in the post but the shipping and handling killed the total price, I was charged $321 of s/h which gave a total cost for the pc of a little more than $1600. As a side note I think I should read about RAID then because I don't know anything of how to set it up. I think I read somewhere that a raid is a configuration in which you can set more than one drive and it will appear on the pc as one but I'm not sure if I am right so I will do some research on that subject.

In reply to Hodgman,
I think that I misunderstood my professor and he was talking about common programming tasks and not the heavy computational and graphics intensives one, sorry for that. But now I know something new and that isn't bad :).

Quote:
Posted by Talroth

As far as your processor for your work goes, only you can really answer the question of 2 or 4 cores.

Well I think I should have stated that I'm planning for the future and that I currently have no knowledge of AI but I will be reading of it in August after I finish my Data Structure class in summer. So I think that for now I could stay with 2 cores and not spend the extra $90 they charge at cyberpowerpc for the 4 cores.

About the case, it will cost me around $75 and I'm choosing it because I think its the better one offered at cyberpowerpc for that price.

I quickly priced things out where I usually shop online, and came to about the same price you have (but in Canadian Dollars), couldn't find the same monitor as you have listed.

Seems like a fair price to me, but I would wait for more input and suggestions from others before ordering if you can wait.

Guys you are awesome! You helped me a lot and I appreciate that. It seems I will have to build the PC myself because cyberpower isn't shipping to my island, Puerto Rico. As Talroth said I will wait for more input and suggestions because I used Amazon to compare prices with NewEgg but there are too many items in Amazon that can't be shipped to Puerto Rico.

Does anyone here knows a good online shop for buying my PC components at a reasonable price? Am I better buying directly from each company or is it fine to buy everything from a single online retailer like NewEgg?

I really want to build it myself to learn from it and get a PC suitable for me.

Thanks for all your replies,

CircuitX

i would ditch that processor and get the e8400, they run at 3Ghz stock and idle are only 28 degrees Celsius. I was personally able to over clock it to 4Ghz stable with the zalman 9700 LED without any problems. It is a little more expensive than the one you picked but will make up for it in the overclocking potential should you decide to do that, BTW crysis will not play reasonable not matter what system you build, give it a couple years and new hardware will run it as well as any other game without sacrificing the settings