>>I am thinking of buying a new desktop machine and looking for recommendations. The main app will be Visual Studio so I want something with some horsepower. Unfortunately I do not have unlimited budget. Looking for great bang for the buck, I guess you could put it. Something that can make VS boogie without breaking the bank.
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>Here's what I've been doing several times for the last ten years (three times my box, twice daughters'): get someone who knows the latest motherboards, to recommend a configuration. Then go on Newegg and buy what the guy says (including the latest power supply unit - which are pretty much the only thing you can't use twice, they always change something to make them incompatible). Get your best old tower case and fit these together when the parts arrive. It's about three hours with just a screwdriver. I got a fairly fast machine now, 4G RAM, 3-core Athlon, and it cost me $400 (add $160 for a total of 1.6T in disks, which I bought separately, one before and one after). The greatest saving was on the video card, which was just a $60 or so, no fan (club) or other fancy stuff, this is no gaming machine. And it looks really nice now... see picture.
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>If I can do it, so can you.

You have entirely too much faith in my hardware expertise. I have been dubbing around throughout May just trying to install a SATA(N) drive and still haven't gotten the machine to acknowledge its presence. Enough of that tomfoolery. The economic theory of comparative advantage goes back nearly 200 years and seems no less true today. Dubbing around with this drive has convinced me my time is better invested elsewhere.

Anyone who could use a perfectly good WD Caviar Green drive, 1 TB, give me a shout. Good as new, never been used.