Any reason why you have to build your own? Sure, it could probably be fun, for a while...
Mac's look stunning, and run OS X. They can run Windows too, should you need it. Maybe you should direct your PC-building energies at switching to Mac instead?
I know, I love the design of the Mac's, but I am in college, a film student, so I need a great system to run video editing and graphics programs but I need to spend alot less than what a MacPro would cost me - $2500 vs. self built PC for $1200 (with monitor). I am thinking that the MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz model (student price) for $1799 looks good, should run FCP smoothly.
There's a big difference between warranty and support. The problems with a self built computer isn't the warranty, its the support. With certain errors its a nightmare to resolve, one part of your computer might be faulty but you may not be able to work out what it is for ages.
As I was looking around almost all the hardware was equipped with a 3-5 year if not lifetime warranty, you can normally tell what is wrong by the symptons of the malfuction, then you just get the hardware seviced, on top of that, you have amazing freedom to upgrade whenever you like, need a better processor - get it, additional hard drive - no problem, more ram - done, I love the freedom and control you get with the self-built machine, but I guess we'll see how much I love it when I put it together, Stay dedicated is the main thing.
logansosa, first of all you've forgotten RAM in your specifications. Add a gig of RAM and you're basically in iMac territory. Although the 17" 2.0Ghz model is a couple of hundred bucks more, you do get a mouse, keyboard and screen. In my experience building computers is too much of a hassle these days. I always used to build my own but I feel that these days technology just moves too damned quickly for everything to get along smoothly. I don't plan on building a computer for myself ever again. Pre-built and with full support all the way!
I've also done the whole install OS X on a PC thing before, way back before official Intel machines came out. While I don't condone it, I'm all for people giving it a try if it convinces them to buy Apple hardware. About a month after I installed it on my custom built machine I'd bought a Mac Mini, a few months later I'd bought an iBook for my girlfriend and myself and a few months after that I bought a Mac Pro + ACD. While the hassles of installing OS X on an unsupported machine and all the driver problems meant I wasn't happy using it as my main OS, it did convince me that OS X was the way to go and I decided to get rid of all my old PC hardware.
If someone that's already got a machine installs OS X on their machine and that then convinces them to switch to OS X then I'm all for that. If people are specifically speccing out new machines in order to install OS X on them then I'm *very* much against it.
After 2 Gig of ram for $79.99 the Total comes out to $950, then add on $300 for a Samsung Sync Master 226 Black 22" LCD, you have $1,250, for an amzingly fast machine that would even beat an Imac, granted the Imac looks cooler but after the warranty and tax, I'm looking at around $2,400 for the 24 inch 2.16 Ghz with 2 Gb and GeForce 7600 with 256 MB and 250 G hardrive, that is just way too much for me, I am a college student, not going to happen.
the hard drive inside the MacBook Pro is limited to a 2.5" SATA drive, so there are no internal 250 Gb available for it. However, after maxing the RAM (2 Gb modules are getting nicely cheap now) the very next thing you should do is get a Firewire 800/400 case and put in a nice big PATA (IDE) 3.5" 7200 RPM drive with a 16 Mb cache. If you really want to spash out, get a Sonnet or Firmtek eSATA card for the expresscard slot, and a multibay eSATA enclosure.
