[ModSocks]

You can buy good, cheap towers all day long.

I wouldn't worry about the brand on the outside of the case too much, though bigger, more commercial brands tend to have a lot more unwanted junk on them....

COUGH COUGH Hewlett Packard COUGH COUGH

Shop around, wait and don't rush it. Whenever i PC shop, the 1st thing i look at is the processor.

Everything else is upgradeable/replaceable.

If you buy a PC with a shit processor, then you'll always be bottlenecked until you replace that processor, and that might also mean replacing the MoBO depending on the socket type. And if you have to replace the MoBo, you probably have to end up re-installing the OS. As you can see, that's way more money/work than buying a PC that's weak everywhere else, but has a strong CPU.

I've built two towers in the last year. One for work, one for home.

The work computer had a somewhat unlimited budget, so i won't reference that.

My home computer though:

I shopped on Craigslist and found a donor Business class model. One of those crappy slim form PCs It was a shit computer...BUT it had a really nice processor. 2nd Gen I5 3.2GHZ Unlocked.

I bought that PC for $200. The processor alone is worth that. So not only do i get the processor, but i also get the Mobo to support it, an HD, Disc drive, 4gigs of Ram, PSU and an OS that's already installed.

So basically, almost $300 worth of stuff for free.

Then i bought an awesome case (Not needed, but i did it anyway), GPU (650 T.I) 4 more gigs of RAM and a new PSU (Also not needed, but so what).

$500 total build cost and i now have a really slick gaming PC that can play pretty much whatever i want on high/Ultra graphics settings.

And it coulda been cheaper had i skimped on the case and PSU. I coulda easily bought a $30 mid tower instead of the $100 midtower i bought, and the PSU wasn't necessary as the factory PSU coulda ran the new GPU i bought.