I will be working on a few fun projects in the spring, but one of them will be *finally* building a new machine for myself. I think I waited a little too long to move over to the new Intel chips (ever since the Core 2, Intel has been wayyy ahead of AMD). But I'm probably one of the more financially responsible 21 year olds you will find, and didn't really feel the need to shell out the cash till now.
Regardless, I'm building a new high-end machine, but still taking the cheap route to some extent. I'm picking up a new Antec P180 for $75 (found on craigslist), and will put together an i7 motherboard, CPU, and ram from newegg. I may wait until february or march as the 930 will supposedly be released in feb at the same price as the 920. The rest will be stuff I already have - my hard drives, optical drives, and PSU should be sufficient.
I figured it was time when I started using my laptop as a desktop (dual monitors hooked up to it, external hard drives, etc), since it was significantly faster for doing all of my work
. At a point, I figure I might as well. I've noticed that the parts from my current machine will net me a good $300+ on eBay (CPU, mobo, RAM), whereas an i7 CPU/mobo/ram will run maybe 700 or so. I've got a newegg gift cert, so my out of pocket cost for this whole thing won't be too bad
When do you guys generally decide its time to upgrade your machine?