I may be building one in the future.

Having a high-end PC for gaming isn't the goal, to be honest. I don't need insane graphics cards. I am more concerned with computational power to ensure that my spreadsheets work quickly. I would assume for something like that, a better CPU & RAM are the order of the day, but I am interested in hearing all suggestions.

My budget is under $1,000 not including the monitor. Thats US dollars, folks, so that means like 400 Euros.

I am unsure who to buy off of - I usually go with Tiger Direct or Newegg...Are there any other stores to look into?

Thanks!

I'd help you but I don't know squat about PC building but I'm sure the PC brigade will be along shortly to help, they certainly did when I asked the same question. In the mean time have a look at this excellent thread.

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=97965

Yes, I'm reading that now. Lots of helpful stuff there. It would seem that Garcian's premium build would fit me - although I wonder if I could substitute the $300 GPU for a slightly less expensive one, and add more RAM. But I'm not a PC builder.

I guess you could sub the Radeon 5850 with either of the GPU's recommended for the Standard Gaming Box and save yourself 100-150 dollars.

The only thing I can say mrstickball, is that I recently built a 800 euros PC (with a 22" LG monitor at 1080) and it currently plays all the games at Highest settings.
Good luck dude!

I was thinking a Radeon HD 5770 for ~ $160 USD

My question, though, is where would the bottleneck on a system be for non-gaming usage (again, mathematical computation for spreadsheets - I plan on using the computer for a lot of Excel and SQL)?

CPU?
RAM?
GPU?
HDD?

Just so you know you dont need more than 8 GB of ram Max. you could EASILY get by with 4 GB. I would reccommend getting yourself a fairly nice video card. It makes your computer last longer without upgrading.

I wasn't dreaming of going over 8GB. I was thinking between 4-6GB or so.

I'm thinking something along the lines of:

Intel i5-750
4GB (or 6GB) DDR3 1600 (looks like its made for i5's?)
Radeon 5770 HD GPU

Just some quickie questions, if you answer these we'll be able to tailor the PC for you.

1. Are you noise sensitive, do you have any specific desires for the computer case?

2. What are you plans for backing up your data in case of failure?

3. What size monitor are you looking at, how many monitors and what configuration? Are you looking at say 1 in potrait mode? 3 in landscape?

4. How big are your spreadsheets etc?

5. Whats your biggest typical complaint when using a PC system?

6. Why not a laptop? Any particular reason?

@mrstickball

That config looks good to me. Out of the components, CPU will be the bottleneck, but you won't notice.