Incremental Builds?

Portaccio

Hey guys, I was just wondering what peoples' opinions were about building a PC incrementally? I've put together a computer before, and I'd like to build another one in the future, but for several reasons, I very rarely have 600 euro or more to drop on parts at once.

I know it's impossible to completely future-proof a PC, but how about if I was to first order the parts that would have the greatest longevity, and then when I had some more cash to go ahead and buy a reasonably up-to-date GPU, processor and motherboard? I may be wrong here, but from following this forum for a while, it seems to me that people have, more or less, been buying the same PSUs, optical drives, RAM (DDR3) and HDDs (7200RPM) for the last few years.

Can anyone give me any disadvantages to building a PC this way, besides not being immediately able to check if your parts are DOA or not? Thanks!

Osmosae

Depends on the timeframe your talking about building over.....

Hard disks you'll be fine, but i'd recommend waiting until they come back down in price since you'll already be waiting
Ram has changed, though that may depend on your application and budget. Things like ram discs and ram cache can speed up your system considerably. Particularly now discs can be held after reboots. Again though depending on the timeframe your talking this is pretty safe to buy
PSU's as long as you have an idea of what you'll be drawing should also be ok
Optical drives are grand

Motherboards, CPU's and Graphics Cards should all be bought together though in my opinion, you may buy a motherboard, a new technology comes out (ive bridge around the corner) and then all previous gens drop in price, suddenly a better processor is available to you but it doesnt fit the motherboard, and you're stuck with old tech. Graphics cards will still work, but change in price regularly enough, again it depends on the timeframe your talking over

Aside from all the above, i would suggest not building incrementally (for the most part). If you can buy parts individually and manage to sustain a normal life, u can save that same money and sustain the exact same life. Exact some will power and save up :P

Others are free to disagree though

Portaccio

Thanks for the reply. I suppose if I was to do an incremental build it would be over the space of a few months, and if I managed to save up enough that I could order it all at once, that'd be a more appealing option...

Also I was reading somewhere that HDDs aren't expected to come back down in price until the end of this year. Is that what the general consensus is?

Eboggles

Nah I'd say it's be grand by June, July.

uncle_sam_ie

This is the way I did it. Started with the Monitor in sept, Case and PSU in Oct, CPU in Nov, and Motherboard in Dec. I still need to get a GPU. For me, it was easier to do it like this. Also, if I had saved the money all up front my wife would have just talked me out of spending it on a gaming PC.

vibe666

that's always the way i do it myself. i have an IT related business, so it all just goes as expenses, but I don't want to drop a big chunk of my wages in one go, so I just buy a few parts each month and add them to an existing PC to upgrade it and eventually i've replaced all the parts in it and aside from the case, it's entirely new.

i normally wouldn't spend more than €300 in a single month, but my current desktop PC is a core i5 750 with 8gb ram, a radeon 6870, two 60gb ssd's in raid0, 1tb data drive, a fancy 750W PSU and one of those corsair h60 watercooling cpu cooler yokes and it's more than powerful enough to do anything i've thrown at it so far, despite never spending more than 200-300 quid per month on building it.

it's also got a 24" 16:9 LCD (an iBOOD special) and two 20" 4:3 LCD's (free from work) either side of it and the same 2nd hand antec sonata case i've had for the last 7+ years, but that's not broke yet (although it does contain quite a bit of duct tape & cardboard at this stage), so i didn't see any point in upgrading it.