Have you stuck to your budget?

[jockey]

I haven't. A little more here and there and there....
Doubled my original budget in no time flat.
Anyone else as bad as me?

 

[bavman]

Lol, not as bad. I originally spent 1300 on my machine. Several months later i'd spent about 200-300 in accessories, extra hdds, etc.

 

[BobVosh]

I went with 700 budget going in, got to 1000 by the time I was done designing. Then I dropped down to 700 again after I waited a week for black friday deals. I was impressed I managed that.

 

[jockey]

Patience is a virtue! Good job!

 

[jaguarmatt]

My budget was $500 for my computer build.

So far I've spent $1,500 in upgrades! =D
(in less than half a year of my purchase)

 

[suteck]

^+1 Sounds like me. Start out wanting the newest i7 before the mainstream i7's i5's and i3's were even talked about. Didn't know anything about overclocking and thought the 4 gigs in my 32bit operating system for the core2 duo laptop was the shizzle. Started out with about $750 in mind. You know $250 for the 920. about $100 for the board and maybe 6 GB's of memory also for around $100. Figured I'd throw in about another $100 or $150 for a really nice case and PSU Plus the $200 for the video card and waalaa Badestass machine EVER!
Man, I got started really bearing down and getting prices and configuring the memory and chipsets and video cards with WHAT - 3 way X 16 PCI-e slots - I GOTTA HAVE IT. And before you know it I'm looking at i7 965 with the asus P6T6 revolution and wow, dang, I REALLY need TWO video cards with 2 GB's of memory each to be able to play the simple, easy first person shooter games! And this motherboard has SAS connectors - what's that?? - SCSI's on board and 10,000 RPM you can run in RAID configs, that's gotta be smoking right?? Got to have the BluRay BURNER and another Just to make the copies FROM too right??? The memory was stupendous, 12 GIGABYTES in a triple channel configuration, and well, don't forget the memory fan coolers!! And what??? How much POWER do I need to start this game player up??? 1,000 Watts cause I don't want to run short right? And Yeah You really can overclock these 965 just by increasing the multiplayer and getting 4.0 GHz right off the bat - no fooling around. And ohhh I'm gonna need AWESOME cooling to keep my CPU cool at these speeds so so so what do I need??? WATER COOLING of course!!! Started with the Domino ALC, you know, the completely sealed unit - no muss, no fuss, - just hook it right up and off you go><><><>< except it can't keep the processor cool at those speeds, only at about 3.85GHz, and that just won't do right?? So I start looking at the real water cooling systems and what you get for performance with radiators and TEC's with the coolit products and reading up on the CPU says it puts out about 500 watts of heat at the 4.0 GHZ depending on how much voltage you put to it. And I thought WOW again!! You can water cool your video cards and the mobo chipsets too!!! How cool is that??? So I ended up getting the ERM R2K3U system and I found out the hard way just how much water blocks, fittings-compression are the coolest, hoses and stuff really start to run up a tab. So I started out thinking well, maybe about $750 or $800 if I dig deeper and BAMMMMM $4,000 dollars later

 

[aznshinobi]

Well I was thinking of selling my current rig and getting (planning to get) an SB build should it be based on LGA 1156 pricing. So I just planned it off on a i5 750 w/ MSI Fuzion (not big bang) and... Guess what, slowly it increased into 2000$. 300$ for a Lian-Li A77F (because the P50WB was too small, that was 200$) and that'd fit water cooling. (Figuring that the 6850 are beasts OCers I planned to WC both of them with a SB WCed). O.O yeah... So the original budget was 1300$ and now it's a 2000$ budget. Almost 600$ just separate for water cooling.

 

[jockey]

Thanks folks, I don't feel like such a schmuck anymore. Although deep down I know better!