I'll have to agree with HiVis, people buy differnt stuff for differnt reasons, myself, i like to buy top of the line, highly overclockable, even tho I only really tinker with OC, I usually run at stock clocks, my passion is tweaking settings, optimizing so that my system runs the best that it can ith what I have. My philoshy is that if I buy hardcore highend parts that can fully withstand hardcore OCing, then under my normal use they will last all that much longer.
My last pc I had for 2 years, AMD 965 BE, semi decent Giga**** mobo, decent OCZ 1600 mhz ram, EVGA gtx 285, OCZ vertex 2 90 GB, it wasnt till about 3 months before I sold it that I got it running to my liking go figure, got it to where I could boot in 12 seconds, still played most games fairly well. Not sure how many times I had to reinstall windows do to user error( messing with stuff I shouldnt have been)
This new pc is about 15 days old, I've reinstalled windows about 1/2 a dozen times, reflashed bios about the same amount of times, rebuilt raid array 3 times, not sure how many times i've rearranged things in my case trying to get better airflow. Tried Windows 8 till i went to install AISuite and it went to restart and got stuck in this rebooting loop with an error message with a frowny face on it :(, reinstall 7 time lol.
Corsair Carbide 540 Air ~ AMD FX 8350 ~ Asus Crosshair V Formula Z ~ 1901 BIOS ~ Corsair Dominator Platinum 2400 MHz 2x8 Gb CMD16X3M2A2400C10 ~ EVGA GTX 1080 Ti ~ Corsair AX860i PSU ~ Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb SATA 3 SSD ~ WD 4 TB 7200 RPM 64 MB ( RMA'd ) ~ Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum ~ Corsair SP2500 2.1 Gaming Speakers ~ 27 Samsung SA550 HD LED Monitor ~