OK I dont know how many of you actually know anything about computers, but crazyhorse can drop the horse part of his name...and the guy who agreed with him can check in to the looney bin as well...DELL computers suck ass. As a computer technician, I can tell you of many horror stories my clients have had with DELL's, HP's and Compaq's are probably worse, but DELL's are crap. They do use Intel AND intel based motherboards, but they are usually proprietary, and wont work in a non-DELL application(it needs to be in a DELL case or it needs to be run with a DELL version of XP or VISTA, something like that I'm not sure) DELL likes to have those MB's made without features they think you wont miss, to save money. Look at it like this, for $499. you get the complete system with a 19" LCD monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse, free upgrade to a 2nd gig of ram, DVD/R-RW CD/R-RW, XP or Vista...Most people know that any mid-quality 19"LCD monitor that isnt a P.O.S. runs about $189, Michael Dell doesnt manufacture monitors he has them made for him, a mid-quality printer runs about $40-$70 including half-full ink cartridges, the "free" 2nd gig of ram probably about $60 nowadays, but ram prices have only dropped in the past year, before that ram was more than $100 per gig, in fact it was more like $100 per 512 mb. CD/DVD R-RW is still around $75, so lets add these things up...189+55+60+75=379 OK Dell is a businessman who buys in large volume and gets a rather nice discount, but it has to be reasonable! Not like the larger than reasonable cuts he was getting from Intel on the cpu's so they wouldnt use AMD cpu's, but thats another story...So lets say Dell gets a 40% cut off the top of the costs of these components for buying in bulk, that is now $227.40. Now figure in the OS License, that has to be at least $70 per, the case, $30?, back up to $327.40. OK I'll go lowballing here and give a 300GB harddrive for $80, so the sub-total now is $407.40. We havent factored in the CPU, motherboard, mouse, keyboard, bundled software...for the remaining ninety-two-sixty, how damn cheap do these last things need to be to get to you for 500 bucks?!?!?! CHEAP components is how Dell offers such a deal, I dont believe you can find a comparably **** motherboard on a computer store shelf. Most people I know who build their own systems INVARIABLY prefer AMD cpu's. And an emphatic NO WAY are home built computers of a lesser quality than prebuilt computers. The competition in the motherboard market is on the shelves of the computer stores, not in the pre-built computers. There are more features on more boards on the shelves than you will find in 85% of the pre-built proprietary MB's. I could talk tech all damn day, so Im going to stop now, but I wanted to set some of those misconceptions I read straight...