Well, I haven't read all the posts (left after 1st page), because it's boring
, sorry. I have read a bit here and there though, and I have to agree with many of th things that I have read so far. This is just like a
+1 to other suggestions I guess, though there are some of mine.
- Between Intel/AMD I would go AMD if you want your PC to last some time and upgrade it along the way, AM3 socket of course. Only cheap Intels are for the already dying socket 775, so upgrading options would be more limited.
- take a good case and PSU, though they don't have to be expensive. I've seen some good suggestions there.
- take your time, when building, when overclocking and when buying, give it time to find good deals.
- if for gaming give more importance to the graphics card than other parts. more than 512MB or vram.
- i'm afraid of this suggestion, but I wouldn't buy expensive OC RAM yet and would try to find a high multiplier CPU instead and lowering the RAM multiplier if required. i.e buying 800 Mhz RAM, set the multiplier to make it 667 Mhz and Overclock from there, it's not until high OCs where ram speed starts to matter enough. Think that in 1-2 years when you will really need the higher OCs, you could still buy better RAM, and probably after that purchase you would have spent the same ammount of cash as if you had purchased the fast one in the first place, plus you would keep the old ones for whatever you want. Hardware prices DO evolve that way.
- I would go with a quad core CPU.
Hope this helps, although probably everything had been said already.
EDIT: OH and BTW I too thought a CPU engineer had joined TPU and was looking for help in creating an indie CPU Company or something like that.