Having been ripped off too many times by a certain large PC dealer here in the UK when buying a desktop system, I decided to build my own system last November when my two year old Packard Bell system died, proving to be all but impossible to upgrade without replacing almost every component. 

I then recently decided that I needed to up-gun this first home-built system, to run Poser and Vue specifically.  Having built one PC already, it meant that I had a decent graphics card (ATI 1950 Pro 512Mb) which could handle the OpenGL  requirements, a Thermaltake case and Lightscribe DVD ROM.  I ended up with:

Thermaltake 500W power supply (£10 from Ebay (new))
ASUS P5Q Pro p45 motherboard (£82) Express
Zalman CPU Cooler (£15 from Ebay (new))
8Gb Geil Black Dragon DDR2 Ram (£120)
Intel Q6600 CPU (£102 from Ebay (new))
1* 500Gb Maxtor HDD for data storage (£45)
1* 250 Gb Maxtor HDD for system install (£25)
Vista 64 bit Ultimate Home Edition (£55)

The components are all top-quality and the system is fully upragedable, neither of which would be the case with a ready-made system.  Plus, I now know exactly what makes my PC tick......I thoroughly recommend a DIY approach.  Using the P5Q with it's 8 SATA slots also means I can re-use all my old IDE (3 of 'em!)drives with SATA adaptors as data drives.  So, for about £500 ($1000) plus a few bits I already had, I've ended up with an 8Gb (expandable to 16Gb) dream machine which took me about four hours to put together.  I have to say, if I can do it, anyone can, it really is simple.  Plus, I have a PC that hasn't arrived full of crap "free" software.....

My self-build system - Vista 64 on a Kingston 240GB SSD, Asus P5Q Pro MB, Quad 6600 CPU, 8 Gb Geil Black Dragon Ram, CoolerMaster HAF932 full tower chassis, EVGA Geforce GTX 750Ti Superclocked 2 Gb, Coolermaster V8 CPU aircooler, Enermax 600W Modular PSU, 240Gb SSD, 2Tb HDD storage, 28" LCD monitor, and more red LEDs than a grown man really needs.....I built it in 2008 and can't afford a new one, yet.....!

My Software - Poser Pro 2012, Photoshop, Bryce 6 and Borderlands......"Catch a  r--i---d-----e-----!"