Looking to purchase a new desktop

[color="#cc8899"]I'm looking for a good pre-built computer, preferably from a well-known company, in the range of 1,200-1,400 dollars. Optimized for gaming/media.

Mainly, I'm posting because every decent looking system I see has mixed reviews of extreme high and extreme low ends of the scale, with nothing in the middle. A lot of them don't seem to live up to their promises, and many (HP Blackbird esp) seem to be a lottery-ticket style distribution of pure crap and total win (seems to be 1/10 or so is completely worthless based on reviews, but idk if this is user-related or a problem with the computer itself.

Anyways, any suggestions based on RECENT purchases?

One option I was looking at
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shoppi...00t_series
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I'm not sure how it works in your area Mas, but here in Canada, you can walk into a Comp Shop and pick and choose what you want. For that kind of money, I don't think you would have too much trouble getting something up to par.

Blech, whatever you do, don't buy from a retailer like Dell, or HP, or something. It is always overpriced, and you can get a waaay better deal for less. Do you have a friend that could buy the stuff and set it up for you? That'd be a better thing, than throwing money out of the window.

Gateway is God tier from what I hear from a friend.

I would advise against buying HP, for what it's worth.

Their product quality seems horrible. Pretty much everybody I know (including myself) has had problems with HP's consumer-level products, although they were mostly laptops.

I would suggest building your own. It's generally cheaper and you feel awesome once you get it running. But if you don't want to be bothered to do it, then I would find someone around who will build you one. I built mine for a little over a thousand including the monitor and it runs everything with minimal issues.