Is this is a total ripoff of Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood's post, "Build the Ultimate Developer Rig" (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheCodingHorrorUltimateDevelop...), or did he pick almost the identical components by himself? Maybe he did pick this all by himself but I find it suspect at least that there are so many similarities. He's passing it off as original content but I don't know...
I did read their post when it came out a while back, but I did not use their parts list for this computer or look at it recently. Looking at it now, the 3 common parts were the CPU, motherboard, and case.
Both the motherboard and the CPU are customer choice award items at newegg, with tons of sales and positive reviews. I imagine 90% of people building Intel quad cores use this CPU, and the MB selection is narrow. The case was the big coincidence, but it was $30 off when I bought it, which is why I did.
The "algorithm" I used to pick the parts was:
1. Go to new egg
2. Sort by # of ratings
3. Find the top-rated, high-selling stuff.
4. Look at the % of low ratings, and read a few of the low-rating reviews to see if something is wrong with the component (everything has a few one-egg reviews, but their kind matters)
5. Google the part to see if it's ok in the main reviews or if no major problems are around.
6. Done
These components are basically the only sensible buy if you're buying a powerful multi core server on the cheap. AMD is right out currently, 8 gig of RAM is cheap, Q6600 is the only cheap intel quad core (and it's nearly as cheap as the cheap dual core chips) etc. So it may well just be a coincidence.
