I think I recall Canadian friends buying their parts from
Tiger Direct before, but I couldn't make any more specific recommendations.
It's also difficult to recommend parts without a budget, but some general advice:
Antec cases are great.
Don't buy a cheap PSU, you'll regret it.
If possible, buy a fairly small SSD as the system drive and a big hard drive as a data store. Boot and load times with an SSD are insane. I use Western Digital hard drives. My SSD is Corsair, but the specs probably make more difference than the manufacturer for an SSD as they mostly get the actual memory chips from the same places.
Intel processors are the way to go at the moment. I recommend Gigabyte motherboards, but there's plenty of options around.
AMD graphics cards are often better than nVidia at lower price ranges at the moment.
Memory is cheap, so you probably want 8GB of RAM unless you're on a REALLY tight budget. Corsair is my preferred brand.
Make sure you get a 64 bit OS.
Mostly you should be fine with the cooling included with the case, processor and graphics card, but you might want to use a 3rd party CPU cooler. If so, get some Arctic Silver thermal paste (by far the best); there's various options around for coolers and I couldn't recommend anything specific, but you should get one designed specifically for your CPU socket with push-mounts, as they're vastly easier to fit.
I think that covers all the major components. If you need peripherals and miscellanea as well, you likely have your own preferences, but if not: doesn't really matter for optical drives, they're all basically the same; Logitech tend to make good peripherals (my mouse and smaller speaker set is Logitech), as do Saitek (my keyboard). Creative speakers used to be good (my big speaker set is theirs), but I've not heard much from them lately. Samsung monitors are generally fantastic; we've got a couple of 1080p res monitors from the Bxxxx series (a 21" and a 24"), which are great, and a couple of other Samsung screens as well, both of which are also good.
Hope that helps. I can make more specific recommendations with a budget.
Sentynel - Head Ninja, Admin, Keeper of the Ban Afrit, Official Forum Graphics Guy, and forum code debugger.
A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise, a morning filled with 400 billion suns - the rising of the Milky Way
