Originally Posted by NoahAndrew Have you considered building one instead?

I would have recommended building it himself as well but the cost is undeniably going to be more than just buying it premade.. And he mentioned he didn't have a lot of hardware experience.

You'd have to consider the fact that he'd have to buy all of his parts so the cost would be:

Case
PSU
Motherboard
CPU
Heatsink
Thermal / Thermal Cleaner (for any mistakes)
RAM
HD
Optical Drives (DVDRW/CDRW)
GPU (if motherboard doesn't have on-board)
Misc (wifi, case fans (if not included), sata/ide cables)

When I rebuilt over the summer I spent about $500 alone on just a couple of new parts. Was for CPU, RAM, Mobo and GPU. It was infinitely less since I was already reusing my Antec case, hard drives, optical drives and all of the other little parts. Then again it was for an i7, DDR3 and a USB/SATA6 mobo.

It can also be pretty unnerving building a computer for the first time if you don't really have someone that can help assist that's done it before. Years back when I had a heatsink fan that broke on me, the CPU pulled off with it and after I put it back in, I didn't check to ensure that all of the pins were in correctly. ONE itty bitty pin was bent and no matter what I tried, I couldn't straighten it out.. so I had to buy a whole new CPU to replace it .

Once you get over your first build it's easy after that. The only times it can be a PITA is if you've got old SATA firmware on there or old mobo firmware so shit is on the fritz and doesn't behave like it should.