I am a first time builder, and i am planning on building a farely good computer, but i am not sure on which products to buy. Can someone lead me to a good website that gives me a list of products (such as motherboards) and compares each of them? i appreciate it.

try www.newegg.com or www.zipzoomfly.com or www.tigerdirect.com best of luck Frank :

skip tiger..check their rating on resellerratings.com if you need to be persuaded..newegg and zipzoomfly, absolutely, and also check out www.chiefvalue.com for hardware reviews..there are plenty of review sites, such as: www.anandtech.com www.firingsquad.com www.dansdata.com www.tomshardware.com what kind of system are you looking to build? gaming or just general use? amd or intel? let us know and we'll help point you in the right direction Abit NF7-S 2.0 Athlon XP 2600+ @ 2.3GHz 1GB Mushkin PC3200 Sapphire 9700pro 120GB WD 160GB Maxtor VGA Silencer Zalman CNPS 7000B AlCu Aspire Chameleon 550W

well i want it to be a really solid computer, i want it to have the capability of doing everything (whether its gaming, video editing, or ripping). I am thinking AMD because it doesnt get as hot and i can overclock if i wanted to. im also thinking about getting a water cooling system. the one item i have no clue about is the motherboard. Any sugesstions? thanks very much.

You really haven't given us much to go on & you haven't given your budget. - If you go with a S939 A64 CPU, the 4 cheapest of the different models at newegg are 3000+ Venice ($164), Opteron 144 Venus ($200), 3700+ San Diego ($235), X2 3800+ Manchester ($286). - A decent S939 nF4 Ultra board will run you at least $100. - 2 x 512MB PC3200 about $80-90. - decent gaming card about $200. - decent power supply about $75. So you're looking at about $600-700 & that doesn't include the case, HDD, optical drive(s), etc

ya sorry about that. Im thinking about a $1,000 budget, so what you gave me sounds like its gonna fit the budget, and of course buying the other things will get it to about $1,000. is it worth it to buy a water cooling system and if so, about how much do they run?

I usually take some heat for saying this (no pun intended), but I'm not an advocate of water cooling. Unless you're really gonna push your system to the extreme, it's just an unnecessary added expense. To me, it makes more sense to invest the money elsewhere, but to each, his own. There are complete units that sell for $100 or less...here's one of them: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/223 Here's a site dedicated to water cooling: http://www.water-cooling.com/