I wouldn’t do it off the bat, learn the basics first, Its easy for me, but I have experience with it, the best thing is to take it slowly, I can build a pc in 10 minutes, but I normally take 2 hours to do it. Have patience and enjoy yourself. The H2O isn’t in yet, but for water I recommend Dangerden or Swiftech, or Asetek. And a good water is $500 total.
How much experience do you have building pcs? You say a lot but I would like to know time wise. 
Also, one of you mentioned that a SATA seagate drive would be really good but, what about Maxtor drives? I’m only asking because on my current pc I have a secondary internal drive and I received a free 250 gig SATA Maxtor drive from work and it would be ideal if I could use that as a secondary drive also. I would undoubtly go for a Seagate as my main one, though unless I read a lot of bad reviews about them.
I am young I supose, hence cue the Neon Lights ;), but I have 5 years since I been building them for myself, and companies. 
Maxtor is pretty much a Seagate now, they had some issues for a period of time, but you should be good now. You should also raid, if your going to have multiple drives.
What’s raid?
2 HD’s working together, you need 0 specifically:
prob use a 64k stripe or 128k, depends on your hd’s and goals.
Its simple stuff that gets complex fast ;).
I also build custom pcs, so if price isn’t an issue we can talk, you won’t save as much, but you’ll get what you pay for ;).
later.
Just wanted to drop my own $0.02 here. Basically everyone here has given really good advise especially pyro_dragun’s detail post and the hardocp.com link. That site has tons of info in their forums section and you be better off doing research there than anywhere else.
Also with regards to watercooling, they are relatively easy to setup if you can follow directions. You can get a nice starter setup at dangerden.com for less than $200. Since you’re just new(I’m guessing) to this, just get the package they offer instead of picking your own parts. You can do that once you get more comfortable. Here’s a couple of boxes I have with w/c if you are interested in what they more or less look like(don’t mind the dust and messy wiring, I’ve gotten lazy in my old age…)
http://picasaweb.google.com/wliu0912/Asdf
Again, you can tons more examples and info at the hardocp forums.
With all that said, I have one last time to say. I recommend you buy a custom pc from falcon northwest or overdrive pc. It might be more expensive but it will be worth the cost due to one thing, support. Rolling your own is a great way to save money but what if something goes wrong? Unless you know some pc guru locally that you can take your pc to when shit breaks, trouble shooting a problem will be quite fun to say the least if you’re brand new to this.
But if you decide to build it yourself, have fun and prepare to spend alot of money in the future since you will always want to upgrade to the lastest and greatest.
I’ve thought about buying a custom pc. But, then what’s the difference from what I did to buy the pc I bought years ago? If I do that then I’d be spending twice as much or more from what a few guys tell me for something that I can learn to do on my own. Believe me, once I start doing research on this stuff I will go OVERBOARD on information and probably know way too much.^_^’ Also, I checked those two sites out and the minimum purchase price seems to be about 3,000 which is probably 1,000 more than I want to spend. I may want the best at the moment but I’m sure that something slightly less won’t bother me since I never have played pc games outside a couple of fighters. Just that it seems a lot of good games are starting to come out for pc as opposed to before and I want to be able to at least play them without being all frame skipping.
I really would like to thank all of you again for your help and links. It’s pretty much up to me now to get the ball rolling. hehehe
I really don’t think raid is worth going for these days. You get a better price/performance/reliability ratio out of getting one good quality drive.
As for 3k for a PC, I think you’re going waaaaay overboard to play games well. I would recommended something along the lines of a 3.0 ghz core 2 duo, a 8800 gts, and 2-4 gigs of high quality ram (depending on whether you’re running XP or Vista). I did a similar upgrade recently and spent only 1.2k, but I recycled an old hard drive, sound card, monitor, and my case. You could definitely get a great system for the 2k range.
As for the difference between spending that at a commercial builder versus building it yourself, honestly if you have absolutely no experience building PCs and no friends that can help you locally, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend self-building. Most of the build process is pretty easy, but there are a number of little things that can fuck you up pretty bad.
For someone that isn’t hardware savvy, getting a commercial build might well be worth it for the warranty alone. Plus you are pretty much guaranteed the thing will work fine out of the box. In comparision, my motherboard for my last build was DOA. I had to wait 2 weeks to get it RMA’ed and a new one back to me. Some would rather not go through that hassle.
edit: oh, and if you’re working on your first build, I seriously recommend not over-clocking and any of the things that go with it, IE water cooling and the like. Seriously, keep it simple the first time.
Yea, I won’t try overclocking right off the bat. But, it sure is something for me to look into. There’s a pc repair guy near me that seems pretty knowledgeable since he said he builds pcs all the time. So, if I mess up along the way I could always take it to him to find the problem. I don’t really want to pay him to completely build one for me and I think it’ll be good in the long run even if I mess up a lot along the way to learn how to build a pc myself and all the mechanics that go into it :p.
Take a look at my old pc, just google hp a475c to get the specs and tell me if it was a good choice. Take note that I bought this pc a long time ago (pretty much going on 5 years now). I’m planning on selling it to my brother which in turn will give me a couple more bucks to spend on my new one ^_^’
I can’t really accurately gauge whether it was a good buy, as I don’t remember prices per components on five-year-old hardware. Though I can give a good guess: no it wasn’t, as it is a HP. HPs and Compaqs should be avoided like the plague.
there’s no real world gain in striping so…
just look for others who are making their own builds.
There is in load times, so thats not true. The thing is with procs with the speed they are at, its not as noticeable, but stress your rig enough, the raid will come in handy.
Though I can’t wait until Solid State drives are cheap.
I honestly don’t like Raid 0 that much. It is too risky for me, since I would rather have a little less performance and a lot less chance of losing my data to corruption. It saves you a few seconds of loading time, but with a lot more risk of data corruption. However, if you don’t have any important info on your computer and all you are gonna do is install games on it, then Raid 0 might not be a bad choice, snce you will probably want to reformat the PC every once in a while anyways.
oh fuck i’m an idiot - to make up for my faux pas, let me konw what you’re looking for in a computer and i’ll spec one out fo ryou