PC Hardware → The best way to purchase parts over an extended time period?

...Stick your $200 a month in a sock drawer, and when you have enough, buy everything at once.

If you can't afford to buy all of the parts right now, don't bother buying any of them. Every component you are looking at will be cheaper 3 months from now. Its one thing to see CPU prices drop $30 the day after you get your new rig running, but do you really want to see that kind of drop the day after you buy, and still have to wait several months to even use it?

Stick your $200 a month in a sock drawer, and when you have enough, buy everything at once.

I didn't see anyone mention warranty. It starts on the date of purchase, not when you finally get around to trying the part. Many sellers will do a 30-day DOA swap for you, but after that you have to deal direct with the manufacturer. DOA parts are rare, but having to hassle with an RMA process when you really want to be playing with your new toy is no fun.

First there were statements concerning video cards, JoelC707 was correct in that I want the higher end card(s) because of the crunching potential.

As far as the CPU, I am really leaning toward the high-end I-7's, while I am unlikely to "need" this currently, I typically get several years out of a computer so I figure that these CPU's would remain pertinent longer.

It appears that the overall consensus is to squirrel the monthly budget and make a one-time purchase which works except in the case of extremely good deals such as the upcoming black Friday stuff and in the case of peripherals which do not change much in price or technology. Maybe as norwegian said it would work best to combine three methods and get stuff like the case, card readers and other peripherals as I can and save to purchase the major components at once, all the while keeping an eye out for any especially good deals.

If it will help I will look at newegg and make a shopping list of what I would like to build right now if I had the cash on hand and see if that changes opinions on any of these methods.

You went for broke didn't you? Yeah, that's going to take a LONG time to do at 150-200 a month. Maybe put it away and buy in spurts when you can catch a GOOD sale is the best bet. Why stop with 1TB drives? Why not go up to 3TB? You went top of the line it looks like on everything else. I'd suggest a different SSD personally though there is likely nothing really wrong per-se with that choice.

$200/mo means you can build that in 20 months. I think your wants are a little excessive for your budget at hand.

It doesn't seem like HDD space is going to be a limiting factor, since you are doing light gaming (old hunting games) and watching movies/folding. So I would suggest you stick with a single 2TB HDD and go for dual 256 GB SSDs in RAID 0 (back it up!).

I would also spend a little bit more money in the GPU realm and go with 2x 6GB 7970s since you are running 3240x1920 or 5760x1080. Being bottlenecked by your GPU sucks, royally.

Couple questions:
• Do you need 64 GB of ram? Is your folding program capable of using it?
• All things being equal, are you just looking for more cores for folding? How do AMD processors stack up against Intel when folding? if the difference is small, consider dropping down to the four-core/eight thread LGA 1155 Core i7 CPU. It will save you $200-300.

All-in-all, it's a gorgeous build, and I'm jealous.

What are you planning on doing?

1.) Do you just want to buy some parts, put them on the shelf, and when you have all the parts, put them together?

2.) Buy a couple good parts and put a system together with the rest being obsolete, but very cheap parts, and keep replacing old/obsolete parts until you have the system you want?

I can tell you right now if you do 1., by the time you have all the parts, the parts you bought first may be 10% - 50% cheaper, so it's not a particularly smart way to build a system.

It's not going to be cheaper if you do 2., but you'll get some usage during the time while you're still building/upgrading the system.

Thanks for the get-backs.

Are you planning on buying overclocked ram? If you are, I'd suggest sticking to four dimms (still 32GB is a massive amount and you'll likely rarely--if ever--use more than 25% of that) and getting faster clocks/timings on the ram. It will cost more, and the difference may only be 1-3% in terms of performance.

Actually I haven't give it a thought. As far as use currently I have 12GB in my laptop (not overclocked) and use about 25% of that on average with an occasional spike up to 33% +/-

[Aurgathor, looks like I will be saving the most of the money for a one shot purchase, the only caveat to that would be parts that aren't likely to change in price or performance over an extended time period.