A friend of mine is now building them professionally. We worked on this one together about a week ago. It cost him about $2000 USD, but it was done solely as a show piece of what is possible.
From my experiences I would recommend: The prices on AMD processors are cheaper for similiar performance, but Intel's Xeon is currently one of the fastest (based on 3DMark). Avoid Celeron, and anything slower than 400Mhz FSB. You can build a solid machine with either architecture. ASUS, MSI, and ABIT make the best mobo's for DIY building. Good quality DDR333 PC2700 ram is cheap enough and fast enough in most mobo's, certified RAM is too expensive for me. I would select your processor, then choose a good mobo that supports that processor, then choose memory that works with the mobo and then the peripherals you want. If you get a mobo with raid hardware built in on board, consider getting 2 smaller HD's and configure in hardware raid 0. Try to find a case without a power supply, then buy a separate good quality power supply. I just witnessed a bad power supply that came with the case blow out 2 mobo's before taking itself out (which can be very frustrating and expensive).
I currently have 2 PC's (1 at home, 1 at work) built on Asus A7N8X mobo, 1GB Kingston DDR333 PC2700, Seagate 7200rpm 80gb HD, OC'd AMD 2800 Bartons, and Radeon 9800 Pro 128 GPU. It performs like a stock AMD 3200, with PC3200 ram. These cost me about $1000 USD each, but mostly due to the GPU. I am happy with them.
I really want to build a machine with this mobo, or a dual Xeon CPU based on the Asus PC-DL Deluxe mobo.
These guys are my sub-zero hero's.
Edit: Just saw that an AMD posted a higher 3DMark score today. Edit2: Price changed after he added a Plextor CDRW/DVD-RW.
From my experiences I would recommend: The prices on AMD processors are cheaper for similiar performance, but Intel's Xeon is currently one of the fastest (based on 3DMark). Avoid Celeron, and anything slower than 400Mhz FSB. You can build a solid machine with either architecture. ASUS, MSI, and ABIT make the best mobo's for DIY building. Good quality DDR333 PC2700 ram is cheap enough and fast enough in most mobo's, certified RAM is too expensive for me. I would select your processor, then choose a good mobo that supports that processor, then choose memory that works with the mobo and then the peripherals you want. If you get a mobo with raid hardware built in on board, consider getting 2 smaller HD's and configure in hardware raid 0. Try to find a case without a power supply, then buy a separate good quality power supply. I just witnessed a bad power supply that came with the case blow out 2 mobo's before taking itself out (which can be very frustrating and expensive).
I currently have 2 PC's (1 at home, 1 at work) built on Asus A7N8X mobo, 1GB Kingston DDR333 PC2700, Seagate 7200rpm 80gb HD, OC'd AMD 2800 Bartons, and Radeon 9800 Pro 128 GPU. It performs like a stock AMD 3200, with PC3200 ram. These cost me about $1000 USD each, but mostly due to the GPU. I am happy with them.
I really want to build a machine with this mobo, or a dual Xeon CPU based on the Asus PC-DL Deluxe mobo.
These guys are my sub-zero hero's.
Edit: Just saw that an AMD posted a higher 3DMark score today. Edit2: Price changed after he added a Plextor CDRW/DVD-RW.
”There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio.
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