Recommended Companies/Products

Okay, this is a thread about what you think is good and what you think sucks.

For motherboards: Asus, AOpen, MSI, Tyan, SuperMicro, and some Abit products are good bets. I say some for Abit because I've had some less than impressive boards from them. So far, my current rig with the NV7-133R is pumping along quite nicely.

Video cards: Hercules, Gainward, ATI, MSI. MSI always puts out solid products. Hercules and Gainward have done excellent jobs in image quality, despite using GeForce 2 and 3 chips that don't aways have the best image quality (supposedly--I can't tell). ATI used to kill their cards with drivers, but now they have done a massive overhaul to not suck.

Sound cards: Hercules is my choice for a Creative alternative. While creative's products are pretty good, they've gotten very arrogant in the biz, thinking that they can put out half-done products and get away with it or not follow certain specs.

Hard drives: Maxtor or Western Digital. WD has never failed me yet, and Maxtor has a good RMA policy.

Optical drives: Toshiba makes great DVD-ROM's, my 6x one is like 3 years old and still kicking. Philips makes nice CD-RW at a good price. Samsung and AOpen make good CD-ROM drives.
The only company I'd avoid is Memorex. I swear that every drive I have seen from them has eventually died.

Memory: Infineon, Crucial/Micron, and Samsung all make good stuff. PNY does not deserve your money, as they charge the same price as everyone else, yet the RAM cannot even run at the same timings as the other stuff.

Power supplies: Antec, Sparkle or Deer are my choices.

Cases: Super Case or AOpen are particular brands I can name that are good.

Speakers: Creative still makes some pretty decent stuff out there.