Canadian Budget Build

You might want to check out www.shoprbc.com in Ottawa. They have pretty good prices. I bought an AMD system from them about 5 years ago now and it's still running, although getting a tad slow. I am buying a new Intel system from them shortly.

It all depends on what you plan on using your computer to do (video, audio, gaming, etc). Let us know and we can try to help.

ncix.com has the best prices and aftersale support as far as I know. I use them regularly.

As for the build that you need, you're not gonna get a decent gaming machine for 700-800$ if you also need to include a monitor. Especially when we factor in taxes and s&h.

If I were you I'd probably get the Gigabyte DS3L with the P35 chipset. That budget motherboard will be good now and you'll be able to upgrade the CPU and RAM eventually because it supports 1333 FSB and quad-core CPUs.

Couple that with the cheap E2140 dual-core from Intel. I've never played with the E2140 but I'm sure you can easily overclock it from 1.6 to 2.2 or 2.4Ghz.

Add cheap RAM, 1 or 2 GB is up to you. I can tell you that some games like Battlefield 2 are quite memory hungry and you will see a difference between 1 GB and 2 GB.

Stick with on-board NIC and sound card, cheap generic case, decent power supply like a 400-500W NMedia, DVD drive, SATA hard drive, your keyboard/mouse and speakers.

Add your monitor, and whatever $ you have left will decide what kind of video card you can get. That 8800GTS is your best choice but that will go over 1000$ probably, even though not much. Get a 8600GTS if you want DirectX 10 support, or otherwise a Radeon 1950Pro will do the job.