Beavis, what sort of moneys involved in your build, sorry to be nosey.
We usually buy a built pc now but as I kid i did spec my own and spent about 1k on it. It was brill at the time but that was many many years ago lol, ie it had voodoo 3dfx graphic card, 128mb ram, 8gb hard drive lmao...
currently we have a normal system which is crap and takes for every to do anything. I would love something a bit mental but i'm starting to sway towards getting a mac pro