If saving and building over time, I'd not put too much space between buying and assembling. The hardware available is changing constantly and your desires might as well. I'd spend plenty of time researching and put the money away until you are ready to make your major hardware decisions and then get it all at once. If you buy a processor now and a MB in a couple months, you might find that a better processor is available at the same/less cost than the one you bought and stored away for later. As for hard drives, you should probably consider SATA drives and I'd get more than one rather than do multiple partitions.
Hi I'm building a desktop and I'm gonna need some advice on parts to get and what price ranges should be. I'm not too concerned with saving a lot of money as I'm building it over time. I'll have maybe $400 a month to spend I guess, so it's just a matter of waiting a while to get something better if it is expensive. Here's what I have so far:
19" hand me down monitor- my parents upgraded to a flat panel so I inherit their old CRT 19" sweet
Mid size tower case- it's aluminum/steel alloy, which is heavy but bought, cost me $120, but I like it enough
ATI X800 PCIE graphics card- I have a discount on this at work, $300 value at $180 dollars, sweet
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Extigy- an external sound card given to me for a birthday a long time ago for the purpose of using my Mom's laptop to burn cd's and build an mp3 library. It's pretty slick, so I'll want decent 5.1 speakers.
What I need to look at next is a motherboard and processor. My friends have already suggested I get an AMD 64 3200 or higher processor, so I need to find a great motherboard to go with it. How much should I spend and what should I look for when I research them? I'm not really familiar with computers, but I'm a quick learner, so if you get into alphabet soup with me, just tell me why somehting's better I guess, it'll only help me at work.
I want my computer to be the best it can be and I'm willing to spend the money the right way, but if it's not worth it, I'll probably go with the cheaper option.
I play video games and play music with my computer now and will probably replace my stereo with a nice set of speakers on the computer and a ton of mp3's.
I also don't know where to go with the harddrive. Get two? Or just partition a 300 GB. Which is better in terms of performance?
Thanks to anyone who responds.

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