I've been buying this thing one part at a time for the last couple months, I got the two most expensive parts (motherboard and video card) out of the way. My tax will pay for the processor, then i'm just down to RAM and processor. As a nerd, I am giddy as a school girl to put this thing together.
Case - gaming case I already had (Thanks Randall
)
Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard $143
Processor - AMD FX-6100 Zambezi 3.3GHz Socket AM3+ 95W Six-Core Desktop Processor FD6100WMGUSBX - $160
RAM - G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model F3-14900CL9D-8GBSR x2 $60 each $120 for both
Video Card - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150563 $185 after mail in rebate
Power Supply - COOLER MASTER Silent Pro M700 RS-700-AMBA-D3 700W ATX12V V2.3 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply $90
SSD - SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC064D/AM 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) Desktop Upgrade Kit -$120
Might get a second video card and run crossfire mode if I get more expendable income. Total cost of the build is $818. I'm using old parts in the build as well to same some cost, such as the DVD drive from my old computer, 2 old hard drives for storage, obviously the case, and all cables and monitors from an old build. might get a gaming mouse but other than that the total cost is set. My only worry is that as of 2 months ago (the most recent professional review i could find) bios settings had not yet caught up with AMDs Zambezi core and can't fully utilize all 6 cores, which actually causes this processor to have lower benchmarks that a quad core processor in SOME instances. There have been 3 bios updates for the board I'm ordering since then however so there is a good chance the issue has already been fixed, and if not then I can just tell myself that some time in the future my processor is going to upgrade itself for free
overall I'm not worried about that as it's not a huge issue in the first place. So that's it. It's shiny, it's relatively inexpensive for the performance (why I love AMD) and kicks the crap out of my old 4 year old zombie desktop (i call it a zombie because it died a few weeks ago and then magically turned on last night. I have no idea how that happened but I already ordered half the parts for this build so I'm just gonna convert that in to a full time testing/minecraft server.) If any of my fellow nerds see compatibility issues speak up, I'm almost positive that everything will work just fine. The only thing i'm currently unsure of is the power supply.