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I've been a laptop-only user for almost a decade now, but I'm thinking of building myself a desktop soon so I can have more power. While doing some preliminary research, I came across the old-ish SU question Is it still cheaper to build your own PC?.
In the spirit of making questions less localized and more about general learning — per Jeff and others at my recent Meta question — here's a new question: What factors should be considered by someone building a custom PC? Just as importantly, what factors aren't that important?
As a subquestion, how do these factors change based on the intended use of the computer (e.g. software development vs. gaming vs. photo editing/graphic design, &c.)?
1Agreed - overwhelmingly, the first question is "What do you intend to do with this computer?" The question then becomes how does this affect choice of processor, video, RAM, hard drive or SSD's... Different applications may require certain minimums or may take advantage of certain features (SLI or crossfire video for gaming), better GPU's for video encoding (if your program supports), SSD's if your application heavily uses the hard drives... – Blackbeagle – 2011-02-24T03:58:26.977