Where to buy a Really good gaming comp?, what is yours?

1. Use newegg. it's one of the best, if not the absolute best, sites to shop for comps and comp parts.

2. decide if you want a pre-built or a custom built

3. either way, look up pre-builts. IBuyPower and Cyberpower are both good gaming rig companies that make cheaper rigs with better parts.

3a. if custom building, find a good rig that has a lot of the stuff you want, then reverse-engineer it by looking up and adding to your cart all the parts of the rig along with any replacements for lower-end or too-expensive parts to fine tune it to your needs. This also lets you see if buying it pre-built actually turns out to be cheaper. sometimes companies don't offer cheaper rigs because it's lower quality, it might simply be that they get the actual parts cheaper, and their mark-up is less expensive than the mark-up for individually sold parts.

4. price/rating shop via amazon and google. Don't settle on one thing and stick with it. check the reviews, check amazon and other sites for better prices. See if maybe there's a better version of a part/rig that's on sale at the actual manufacturer's site.

5. before buying anything, check for any deals you might be able to get from other sites (these often involve first-time customers). it may sound silly, but say for instance you play on kongregate.com, you might be able to get free kreds just by taking the time to see if they have a promotion going on for one of the sites you're about to use. it may make the final cost cheaper, and you get some stuff for the site you got the offer from as well. (kong may or may not actually have an offer like that for any computer sites, but still, just an example)

6. make sure you know what the heck you're doing. make sure you have the info necessary to send anything back as quickly as possible if it doesn't work. when buying pre-built, you might have less issues, not because it has a lesser chance of breaking down, but more because if something goes wrong, you can just ship everything back to get a new one, whereas building your own requires you to figure out what the problem was in the first place.

6a. building your own? if you're not an expert at such things, make sure you have a friend with you while you build it who knows how to build them as well. maybe not an expert, but they can help make sure you don't fuck something simple up.

7. update, partition, and backup when you have that chance right on a fresh new comp. much more annoying to do later.

8. have fun.

edit: SG's formatting for lists confuses me, but you get the idea.

Cyberpower or IbuyPower are 2 good sites that make fair priced PC's. Don't go Alienware if your excuse is "I have the money and don't want the hassle" unless you want to pay $500 for the glowing alien head. Those 2 sites will give you 2x your worth compared to alienware and no hassle.

If you have experience with building a computer or feel daring enough to improvise order the single part from newegg and so on.
If you don't get a pre built and then change later whatever acts as a bottleneck (more often than not the videocard).
DO NOT trust stuff advertisted as a GAMING computer. Gaming just means "Give us more money".