Build it your self and you normally end up with a cheaper pc, or a much better one for the same price
Alienware are an exception though
They make quality systems, but they really make you pay the extra....
What he said.
Depending on your chipset you can not buy the max off the rack.
That's quite rare and it never lasts long (like Dell had the exclusive Quad-SLI for a little while there, but now you can build better yourself). Generally, going with ASUS, ABIT, Gigabyte, or DFI will get you much better value, features, and build quality. It does take some research and know how though...
I would not overclock a cpu chip, without proper cooling you will burn it up, and you maybe out $1000+ just for your attempt.
I'd never overclock a $1000 CPU that's for sure!! What would be the point?
The $1000 processors are just factory overclocked essentially. "Tested" at the factory as being definitely capable of those speeds. The dirty little secret of the CPU business is that there is generally no difference at all between the $250 CPU and the $1000 CPU. The latter of the two has just undergone more testing, and the cheaper one is "locked" somewhat to the slower speeds artificially.
I would overclock a $250 CPU, since (especially nowadays) you can almost always get them to perform at the same speeds as those double their cost with little or no risk (and the right motherboard). Actually cooking a CPU is quite difficult nowadays. Generally, they just fail to boot and you have to reset the BIOS to a lower setting next time.
If you take your time and bump the clock a little at a time (testing, testing, testing in between) you don't really have much to worry about. A CPU will start making math errors long before it gets close to the top of it's thermal tolerances (where it would actually break the chip). Back in the "bad old days" of hard volt-mods and multiplier overclocking (Pentium 3 - K7 era stuff) it was easy to fry your CPU, but not anymore. Now there's GUIs that you can use to do it from inside Windows, with automated tests to check success!
The biggest downside is really time spent anymore. It takes a
lot of time and patient testing (and a LOT of time reading boring forum reports and reviews). Some of us (me and dlone apparently) would be spending that time anyway, so why not save the money? Others, could better spend the time doing other things...