I just picked up a HP Pavilion Elite HPE-150t. Ordered on the 2nd, arrived on the 6th. It feels so fast compared to my old Dell. Baseline price without the video card upgrade is $800. Free shipping but you most likely need to pay tax. Costco price is the same if you do the config from their site. The day I bought it there was a HP coupon for an extra 5% off. That coupon has expired but if you go through some referral sites you can get 3% back.
I went ahead with the video card upgrade since I do game a little - Dragon Age: Origins and Star Trek Online. The STO textures and framerate improved a ton, haven't reinstalled DA:O yet. Also I read that by buying a better card at the same time, HP would also upgrade the power supply. Otherwise if you do it on your own down the line you'll have to pick up a PSU as well. Price would have been close to eBaying a card and PSU considing the discount and everything. It shipped with a 460W PSU.
Dell had a sale on a similar spec'd model that same day. I had been waiting for a sale specifically on an i5-750 system with 2 5.25" bays so that was quite interesting. Price was a bit higher since there wasn't a coupon, they only had 32-bit Windows so max 4GB memory, and I had to pay shipping. HP was the better deal though getting a clean Dell Windows 7 DVD instead of the HP recovery crap would have been very nice.
I did consider building my own a few months ago but decided that I'm too lazy. I have no need for super high end stuff any more. Besides, I have to deal with computers for work already, having something that works and has a warranty is nice.
• Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-750 quad-core processor [2.66GHz, 1MB L2 + 8MB shared L3 cache]
• FREE UPGRADE! 6GB DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM [3 DIMMs] from 4GB
• FREE UPGRADE! 640GB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive from 500GB
• 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4850 [2 DVI, HDMI and VGA adapters] (+$140, now +$150)
• LightScribe 16X max. DVD+/-R/RW SuperMulti drive
• Integrated 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) Ethernet, No wireless LAN
• 15-in-1 memory card reader, 1 USB, 1394, audio
• No TV Tuner
• Integrated 7.1 channel sound with front audio ports
• No speakers
• HP multimedia keyboard and HP optical mouse
• Microsoft(R) Works 9.0
• Norton Internet Security(TM) 2010 - 15 month