Alright so, I'm thinking of getting a new computer but I want to custom build it. Do I have to order all the different parts separately or is there some site where you can build your own pc from scratch customizing the case, hdd, gfx card, motherboard and all that? I tried googling for this sort of thing and the only thing that really came close to what I was thinking is buydirectpc.com and that had really shitty options and it looked like a rip off. So if there's a site somewhere that I'm missing that ships to canada that can do all this then it'd be great if one of you computer whizzes pointed me in the right direction...

That said, all advice is greatly appreciated.

lol I get to be the first to say newegg.com? awsome

don't I have to buy specific hardware from newegg

Yes you have to pick out parts from newegg.ca and put it together yourself.
Give us a price range and we can pick the parts for you.

Some websites like Dell, HP, etc allow you to customize their builds with processors, RAM, GPUs, and some other stuff. It might be worth it to do that instead of custom-building it. When CAFG tried to custom build a PC following SEN's advice for the first time, he ended up regretting it. Others haven't. Ordering the parts and building it yourself can be a mess, unless you know a ton about computers - parts can be faulty, can be incompatible (though you can tell that from the specs), etc.

When you buy a computer you have 2 options:
Buy a prebuilt, or build it yourself. Building it yourself is always cheaper, and allows quality control. However, building it yourself comes with inherent risks, and unfortunately, virtually no professional support without paying for it.

If you buy a laptop, your only option is prebuilt. There are some sites which let you do some configuring of laptops, but they're still prebuilts.

There are some horror stories with building your own computer, as CAFG can tell you in all its gory details. Ex can tell you of his RMAs and how disappointed he was in the service rendered to him, however, he will still recommend you build it yourself. From my experience, I can tell you how everything has worked perfectly, except for a few times when it wouldn't boot and I took it apart and put it back together again. When I first built my computer in 2006, I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing. That pretty much all changed when I actually built the computer. It's simple to build a computer, but as I said, if something goes wrong, you might be sort of lost.

Since you live in canada, the prices you will be paying are around 10% more than the US, and your choices will be limited severely. Personally, since canada is so expensive anyway, I think it's more work than it's worth to go search around for deals on more than a few web sites. Virtually nothing ships free either. NCIX is another site which I think is decent, and features a PC builder which you might like. Likewise, tigerdirect.ca has stuff. In the states, newegg has the best average prices, and is usually the cheapest, but there's plenty of other sites which beat them easy.

When building a computer it helps a lot to open your old computer and compare.

thanks a lot everyone. I think I'm gonna buy seperate parts from newegg and put it together myself. It is a bit scary tho making sure everything is compatible... I also wanted to ask are most computer cases pretty standard when it comes to motherboards fitting in and all that or do I have to get specific cases for specific motherboards?

Yes and no. Yes, it means you can pick X CPU and pair it with Y GPU for the best results for Z dollars, whereas if you were buying pre-built your only option for Y GPU might be to get Q CPU and pay Z+R dollars, when all you really wanted was X CPU and Y GPU. If that's what you mean by "quality control", then yes, but I would call that simple customization.

In terms of actual quality components, not so much. Generally if you stick to well-known brands you'll be fine, but you can still get dud batches of products (particularly GPUs). You could also buy little-known brands or low-quality components (especially power supplies, probably the worst item to skimp on) that in the long run cause you more problems than it is worth. If you're buying pre-built from a well-known company, the chances of buying dud or bad-compatibility parts is considerably lower, and if something does go wrong, the company will generally sort it out for you (under warranty etc), whereas buying pre-built you'll have to diagnose the problem and correct it yourself, or pay someone $$ to do it for you.

Also when you buy it yourself, there's odd cases where you buy products that should be 100% compatible, or at least there is no reason to believe that they won't be, but for some reason they just won't work together. This happened to my ex, with a rather bizarre experience where an 800w PSU wasn't properly compatible with his specific motherboard (after turning the PC off, sometimes it would just not turn back on unless you sat there pressing the button for 15 minutes). I had exactly the same motherboard, and it worked fine for me, just not on his one. Turns out the PSU was just slightly outside the specs, so while it worked 99% of the time, evidently there were some combinations in which it just wouldn't work. He even bought a second 800w PSU the same, and that one again didn't work with his mobo but worked fine for me. The rest of that PSU range worked fine though - I have a 550W powersupply that worked fine with his mobo, and he later bought a 700w one to replace it and that worked fine too.

Actually I did see a site a while ago that let you buy individual components and you had to assemble it yourself, like a desktop. However looking at their options I was very underwhelmed - the case in particular was a bit larger than comparably priced laptops and looked pretty ugly to me, presumably because they can't guarantee what components would be installed they had to make it bigger for cooling purposes. So realistically yes, for laptops they are pre-built, and you would need a very good reason to go otherwise.

I mean quality. IE this unit uses japanese capacitors rather than chinese capacitors (china's products are generally inferior to everything from japananywhere else). CPUs are all good. Neither AMD nor Intel make or sell many "duds". Most GPUs are decent. There's no real clear "shit tier" among GPU manufacturers, though obviously XFX is the best due to warranty.

Prebuilts like to skimp on the other stuff: cases, power supplies, and motherboards, all of which are quite well known for having seriously low standards. Antec cases are generally poor quality, and the prebuilt cases almost always have a large amount of plastic on them. You usually have no control over what case you get in a prebuilt.

Power supplies in prebuilts are always hidden from you. How do you know if your power supply is 80+ efficient? What's the actual wattage of it? Should you just trust the company to give you a power supply which can support a dual graphics setup or a few extra hard drives down the road? Can you trust it to not blow up in your face? I don't know of any prebuilts which use seasonics.

Finally motherboards are of dubious quality, and generally lack any sort of overclocking in prebuilts. They come with an OEM bios which doesn't allow you to change anything a BIOS should be able to change other than the date. Gigabyte, DFI, Asus, and MSI are all pretty well respected brands, and are better with quality control than most other brands (there's always exceptions), decreasing the likelihood you will receive a bad unit or that it will die on you a year later. You better believe none of those brands are in a generic dell. What's more is that they keep this a secret from you too. A lot of times they're actually custom or outdated products that can't be bought anymore except through the OEM, so if it does break, you have no choice but to buy from them to replace that exact motherboard.

I did know about the sites which let you "build" your laptop, but yeah, it's not realistic. It's cheaper to buy a prebuilt laptop than a custom one.