So...

[Magyk]

Well, I was talking about amazon in general - not just PC parts.
I built my PC on Cyber Power Systems' site aaaages ago, and have been scooping up parts whenever possible to upgrade.

[Turky]

Newegg's site is BY FAR the best inventory browsing system I have seen yet. It's great when you're shopping in a new category and don't know what features are available. Headphone or headset? 2.5mm, 3.5mm, RF, IR, Bluetooth connection? Supra-aural, circumaural, earbud, canal, single ear? Cord length? etc.

Newegg
Amazon
Buy (.com)

Costco and MicroCenter can have good prices, but there are none near me, and afaik they don't ship.
SVC.com has a massive selection of everything cooling related (heatsinks, fans, etc) and good sales prices.
Best Buy and Dell are usually high, but can have good sales.

I agree about Newegg's inventory browsing, whenever I go to other sites like buy.com or ecost I start to realize how spoiled I am. It's hard to get things narrowed down to more than "wireless adapters" without using keywords. What if I want a USB one? An ethernet one? With Newegg, they'll have all of their products categorized as such already, without you having to manually search with keywords and hope to find one that matches up.

Costco.com does ship, by the way. That's where I got my first digital SLR camera.

[Maximus]

I built a bulldozer system for shits on tiger direct with a ssd and a hdd, sli gtx 280s, and liquid cooling for 1300......

Not to drag this out too long, but a 2500K and 460's will bench 50% or more the performance of bulldozer and 280's for some applications, and probably come in around 200W less power on average - a lead which Intel will only grow as the clocks go up.

To do a true comparison and figure out which store is "cheapest", really the only way is to load up a cart at both places with the same items, down to the model number, and compare the total. I did this when shopping for groceries at Walmart and Publix, using the the same name brands and assuming the generic items like milk and eggs to be equivalent, and found Walmart to be 13% cheaper.

Edit: Important omission from the earlier list: Monoprice for cables.

[tens0r]

spent $1000

[Turky]

spent $1000

There we go. End of discussion!

[Kain]

Amazon is pretty beast for general shit.
New Egg for computer parts for sure.

Though I ebay a lot of random shit

[Magyk]

eBay is good as long as you're a good eBay user.

[Kain]

ive never been fucked over on ebay, thankfully.

[Max Rambone]

Yeah, many good deals to be had on ebay.

I even bought a car once on ebay.

~archi

[Magyk]

I've never bought an entire car on eBay, but ebay motors is like my go-to website for car parts.