Excuse the mess. We’re just cleaning up around here still, and we’ve got a lot of stuff to either throw out or decide where it will end up.
This is not an advertising page. All of the links (when there are links) will be my honest choices for useful resources during the build process. However, some of them do actually make their money by selling stuff, so I suppose this is advertising of a sort.
For one thing, I doubt I could get along without Newegg.
Sure, I don’t always buy from them. They don’t always have the best prices, and they sure as hell don’t always have all of the obscure little bits that inevitably find their way into my ‘must have’ file. I’ve never purchased every item for a build from them — there’s always at least one or two things that someone else can do better.
However, Newegg has the single best site that I’ve seen on the ‘net when it comes to ‘rough drafts’ and even more finalized designs for a build. A wide variety of choices, great prices (sometimes the best, especially with the combo deals), and an extremely user-friendly shopping cart setup. Forget all the ‘builder’ sites with huge drop-down boxes for each component selection, or the catalog sites which pretty much force you to start from scratch with every new component selection (TigerDirect can bite my shiny metal ass).
And as I’ve said, when it comes to tech reviews and roundups, there’s nothing better than a little Tom’s Hardware. I’m sure many of you have some sort of attachment to CNET or maybe one or two of the sites with “pc” or “comp” or “extreme” or “tech” in the title, but I’d be okay trading them all for Tom’s. No really, it’s THAT good.
Um, where else? Well, I’ve been hanging around FrozenCPU on and off for a while now, and it’s the perfect example of a place that has what Newegg does not. Xoxide and Guru3D are always worth a visit, too.