Hardest for me by far is case. No case seems to offer the combination of features, size, looks that appeal to me. Because of this my computer is still using a hand-me-down case I got back in 2005. It is a huge piece of crap but I can't find a case that I can justify replacing it with.
As for motherboards, since Abit went under, I switched to ASUS, so that makes that choice easy, just find the asus motherboard that has the features I want and get it.
For graphics cards I get sapphire for ATi or EVGA for nVidia, so from there it is pretty easy, just find the one that fits my price/performance/power usage requirements and get it.
For CPU, I don't buy intel processors for myself, ever. My last intel processor was a pentium MMX 233 back in like 1995 or something, I think I paid like 400 bucks for it. Even though AMD has been having issues being king of performance, I never got the top performing CPU anyway, I just get what performs best at about 100-150 bucks and that suits my needs fine, and in the last 10 or so years, AMD has been the 100 dollar performance champ.
Memory used to be hard, but now it is so cheap, I can just grab whatever amount at whatever speed I want and if I have problems I can use any of my extra ram while I return it.
optical drives used to be tough too but now it is whatever I have that is laying around or what oem piece is at fry's for 20 bucks.
I haven't bought any SSDs yet, but I am sure that will be tough when they start to get into the price range that will make them attractive to me (50c/GB)
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