Thread: building a new computer

Lovely case, Fractal make some great looking and performing cases, however it all depends on wheather looks are an important factor for inneed. I personally wouldn't bother with the SSD at this moment in time, especially for inneed's needs. If he could afford a big enough one that meant he could do all his encoding straight off the SSD then that would speed things up hugely, however a 60GB SSD is only really big enough for an OS install, and whilst it will improve boot times and make the OS feel snappier, for the current premium in price over traditional hard drives it simply isn't worth it quite yet, unless you're a pc enthusiast. I've tried to come up with something a little cheaper, but should perform just as well for the majority of tasks:

Case: Antec One Hundred. $49.99. The older Three Hundred is also good (costs $10 more), I've got it as a server case and it's very good for the price. Function over form, but it's not totally ugly either. If you like the looks, the Coolermaster HAF 912 is another great budget case. Personally, I hate the design. If you want to spend a little more, then Fractal's Define R3 is great.
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 (Rev 3.0). $164.99. Sandy Bridge is here, and by all accounts it's simply amazing. Make sure it's a Rev 3.0 board, as earlier versions were recalled due to a ploblem with the chipset.
Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K. $224.99. Quad core, 3.3GHz, hugely overclockable if you fancy it, low power, low heat. The best bang for buck out there!
Memory: G.Skill 4GB DDR3 1600. $47.99. 4GB is really sufficient for your needs. Sandy bridge seems to have gone back to dual channell memory instead of tripple channell.
Graphics Card: PNY GeForce GTS 450 1GB. $124.99. I'd go for an Nvidia card, because more companies support CUDA than OpenGL, for if/when encoding get's transported across (it might already have). If you can stretch to a 460 or one of the newer 500 series cards, go for it, or even go for a lower card at this point in time, it's up to you.
Power Supply. OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W. $79.99. I like the Corsair PSU's personally, but this is much cheaper than the modulat Corsair PSU's. Has had excellent reviews aswell.
CPU Cooler: Thermaltake Frio. $57.99. Seriously good CPU cooler.
Hard Drives: Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB. $69.99. 2TB seems to be the sweet spot at the moment with the best GB/$ costs. Granted this is a 5900rpm drive, not a 7200rpm, but speeds are still very good, and it's cheaper than the quicker alternative. You really won't have any problems with these drives. I've got four of the 1.5TB models in my server. I personally like Seagates, but all makes are good. Samsung Spinpoint F3's seem tobe coming out tops in many tests though, so consider them. Hitachi don't have the best rep, but I doubt you'll find any problems, they may just be a bit louder than other brands.

Total cost: $820.92. If you've got a SATA optical drive in your system at the moment, then use that, otherwise they cost very little. I'd suggest getting Windows 7, best windows there is by a country mile. How does that sound?

Edit. Comparison benchmarks for the AMD Phonom 11 X6 1075t v Intel Core i5-2500K: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/288?vs=185