:beer: to you.
I believe I understand your frustration with the "hit and run" newbies. I am an active participant in several stock message boards. These stocks pay dividends and invariable every quarter we see a flurry of "when is the dividend gonna be paid?" posts from newbies...even though the information is clearly stated in the company's press release! It is frustrating....and, of course, they never add anything to the thread (most are never heard from again).
Again, thanks for you work that went into this thread. For me, the timing could not be better!
I'll offer the following suggestions:
1) point to a thread/guide discussing the "how-to's" and basics of overclocking. While overclocking is not for everyone, it is a dominant theme in these forums and when building a system, the choice to overclock or not does have implications on your choices (as I'm quickly finding out!).
As I said in my "Yet another newbie needs help" thread....I started learning about all of this stuff shortly after January 1, 2005. Building my first system is my New Year's Resolution. What I'm finding is that overclocking may be an avenue to help me accomplish my ultimate goal: to build the most powerful system I can for the least amount of money (which is a lot of peoples goal!). Said another way, I want to find the sweet spot on that cost/capability curve.
2) Perhaps add some high level narrative on how to choose components/where to start conceptually. You offer some excellent choices for different system types (budget, mid, high, the BEAST), but HOW did you go about making your choices? I understand reading the reviews, etc. and you do point to excellent sites, but how about more narrative on the how?
Ok, I'm not really being clear on this, but here's an example: when I started researching all this stuff, I thought that I could easily choose a component at a time and be fine......I've learned that I was wrong. Each component decision will likely effect the other choices. I didn't realize that at first. A month ago, my thought process was like...."I'll buy one of those 7-5-4 motherboards, buy the cheapest AMD CPU I can find and put a cool PCI-E video card in it and then just take my 10GB HD from my Gateway system and slap that in there. Plus I'll steal my memory from my old Gateway (all 256K of it) and slap that in there and voila....a new powerful system on the cheap, running my Window 98 like a rocket!"
Uhh.....I've since learned that certain things won't work together so well and each component decision effects the others. It's all interelated. Plus certain decisions (like a fast CPU) can be negated by others (like a slow video card). I've learned much of this from lurking on these forums!
Would you agree, though, that as a starting point, the choice of motherboard is the most important decision? That's the way it seems to me. The motherboard drives everything else...
I'm sure I'm offering only one perspective (that of a newbie who's been learning about this stuff for only about 40 days). Hopefully others will offer others!