FWIW, the folks over at Toms are in the process of getting their DC teams going, one of them politely complained about our recruiting on their forum.
It seems to me our focus audience has to be targeted at serious computer guys (who are all incredbly cool, good looking and get lots of poontang, just like us ). Some sites get lots of traffic (Cnet, Zdnet, etc.) but there are tons of casual computer users that hit those sites and may not fit our target audience. I'm afraid our $1k wouldn't go far at one of the really high traffic sites.
I'm inclined to think a site like Anand's would be the ideal hunting grounds, most of us (I think) got to DC because we were already at Anand, not the other way around. So we need to find people like us that are not already involved in DC. That would suggest Sharkey, Hardocp, BXBoards, Storage Review, etc. Sites like Voodoo Extreme are great, but may be geared more to gamers. Obviously it is a plus if the site owner is not pushing his own teams and might even help a little (probably not likely for $1k).
My second choice would be overclocking/PC retailers like PCNut, Plycon or something; we already got Compucheap for free, no reason to consider throwing any money at those guys.
This may actually be about the first time a poll may actually be useful, list a bunch of sites by category and give everybody 48 hours or so to vote.