Have you had any experience with ibuypower? Seen pretty mixed reviews there
I realize the benefits of building your own system, but I'd rather experiment with one first, instead of possibly messing up my main system
My brother owns one of their custom systems and it runs pretty great!
The thing with iBuyPower is that you pretty much have to upgrade from their default power supply, RAM and HDDs because the basic PSU and HDD choices are almost unanimously low-power, no-name, backwater models and brands.
You'll want to upgrade to a more noteworthy brand of RAM (they usually start you off with some crap four-gig kit of DDR3-1333 and obviously you'll want a solid brand of 4-8GB DDR3-1600).
Also it's obviously it's a bad idea to risk running an expensive custom rig off some awful PSU that's likely to short out or a hard drive that'll just crash a year into owning it, so be sure to upgrade these to something worthwhile. The rest of your choices are pretty obvious, since they let you pick from a decently varied list of makes and models for every component that goes into the order.
If I may suggest: if you do go with iBuyPower or CyberPowerPC, make sure to order rush assembly and shipping (I didn't, and it took them two months to assemble my rig and ship it out), and order the safer shipping option so nothing breaks when they ship it your way.
To be honest though, it's pretty hard to mess up building your own system if you follow online guides and safety rules, so that's the option I'd recommend first and foremost. It'll save time, money, and you can get the best rig possible out of any other option.
