Zalman/Asus all the way for me!  I've got nickel-plated Zalman GPU and CPU fans, on an Asus P5 Pro main board with a 2.66 Quad Core Penyium and 8Gb of Geil Black Dragon RAM, the ones with the red LEDs which are SO cool, and obviously vital to machine running, in the same way that Led Zeppelin and the Cramps on the stereo are vital to my car working.....built it last July, and haven't had a single problem so far.  I run Vista 64-bit on it, which is rock solid, but a real memory hog.  When I had my heart-attack last year, building, tweaking and fiddling with this was great therapy.  I know I would NEVER buy a ready-made PC again.

I really got the computer-building bug a while back, despite not knowing the first thing about it; the machine on the left of the monitor is the first one I built, not really knowing much about the whole thing; a dual-core 2.66Ghz with 2Gb of memory...for some bizarre reason, it kept crashing Vue, and when it does, it then refuses to run Poser, Photoshop, Paintshop Pro or Zbrush, but would still run Bryce. Weird.  I've still got it, in stripped-down form, but need a Pentium 4 3.4 to make it live again.

Pagan (l) and Suki (r) under the desk!

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-----!"