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I decided this time I'll just build one myself instead of paying Dell a premium.

Unfortunately this is not really a good reason to build your own PC in 2006. Economies of scale mean Dell and friends can put together a PC and sell it to you for (generally) less than if you bought all the bits and spent a fun evening putting it together. If this is purely to do with cheapness, I'd give up now and shop for a complete PC.

Having said that, building PCs is fun! When researching the bits you need and reading reviews of motherboards, processors and the like you can learn so much about current PC hardware. The best part is customisation. The fact that you can have your low latency memory, motherboards with high end sound cards, RAID, multiple SATA controllers, the ethernet controller you want to have, a crazy fast graphics card etc etc.

I still build my own PC for home use because it is fun. But it is not cheaper than Dell.
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Hussein