Yeah I'm having the same problem ... what would be the cost of the computers you built if it were sold by a store?

doesn't it end up being the same?

I saved 2k to pay for 1/10 of the alienware I wanted ... haven't made my decision yet, I never built a computer, I guess what I can do is buy the parts and have someone else do it ... cause I don't want to fuck it up.

What are the main parts I should think about buying?
for a gamming, workstation PC

What is the 'workstation' portion of the computer going to be doing? Graphic arts, audio/video decoding, 3D stuff, CAD/engineering programs? Or just like office stuff. If you are doing the non-office stuff then you want an A64 X2. Add in 2gb of RAM, a 7800GTX, and plenty of hard drive space, you have a killer gaming and multithreaded app machine.