Four day bump, but when I heard '8400GS', I cringed a little bit. I would not pay $80 for that thing. I do not know how long ago Bloodstar got it, though, so if he did get it during the heyday of the 8000 series SLI promo, I suppose that absolves him a bit from my wonder.
I have been building custom PCs since the middle of high school, when my friends and I inexplicably turned into enthusaists. This was around the same time we were building trebuchets in our garages out of plywood, bungee cords, and softballs, though, so I suppose after a while we just got bored and started with something a little more technically challenging. A few LAN parties later and suddenly we all get part-time jobs to fuel our addiction to PC parts.
If I could offer my two cents, there are certain elements of past upgrades that will stay relatively consistent as the rest of the field progresses. A good general rule of thumb that we here have always followed is to upgrade your motherboard, processor, graphics card, and RAM, depending on your needs. I went through three upgrades before I replaced my hard drive (and that was because I could no longer find adequate IDE support on socket AM2+ or higher motherboards), and I have never once had to replace a DVD drive.
The meat of an upgrade, actually, does not usually come from the individual parts (unless you are a fool as I am and spend $250 on a graphics card), but usually from the cosmetic upgrades such as a new monitor (can run you up to 400 dollars for a middle-of-the-roader from Newegg), a new case (some people just really like their liquid nitrogen cooling), or even a new keyboard (because sometimes W, A, S, and D just do not cut the mustard), which I have personally seen friends spend in excess of eighty dollars on.
Generally if you search around, you can even get current-generation equipment for low, understandable prices. If you thirst for a quad-core processor, for example, you could try getting AMD's Phenom I x4 series, as with the recent release of the Phenom II, the older models, despite being excessively powerful, have dropped in price to cope with the coming of the new fluff. After a while, you develop something of an eye for a good value -- which brands are most reliable, which ones will get you what you pay for, and which ones you should never put next to a particle board desk (I had to learn that one the hard way).
Buying computer parts is a little bit like being drunk -- generally, you want to be one step higher or lower than everyone else, whichever you can afford to buy at the time. If your friends all have supercomputers, either get something that is just behind them, or get something powerful enough to crack RSA. If they all have okay rigs, get a piece of crap, or get one that slightly outmatches them for a reasonable fee.
Of course, if you opt for the piece of crap, one has to ask why you would ever want to upgrade in the first place. 
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Three tomatoes are walking down the street -- a papa tomato, a mama tomato, and a baby tomato. The baby tomato starts lagging behind, so the papa tomato takes a few steps back, squishes it, and says 'Ketchup!'. |
