My first build was in the week before Christmas 1992
I had spent the previous 3 months going to the shop on a weekly basis handing in £100 towards the total cost. I had asked that the shop would show me how to put it together myself. That Friday I finished my shift at 2pm and went to the shop in my factory blues and handed over the last installment. So £1150 got me the following:
AT Case
Some sort of PSU
Intel 486 SX 25Mhz
Trident Graphics (512KB)
80MB Hard Disk
Floppy Drive
AT Keyboard & Mouse
15' Monitor
DOS 5
Step forward to my current build almost 20 years later, which I've been quietly upgrading for the last few months in anticipation of COD, I've priced in the stuff less than 3 months old)
AMD Phenom II X6 1055 @ 4.2 (€140)
Asus M4A79T (€105)
16GB DDR3 Exceleram (12800 or 1600Mhz) (€165)
ATI 4870 (ordered a 6970 this afternoon
(€289)
LSI 9240 -8i Raid Card (Ebay - €50)
4 * Samsung F3 1TBs in RAID 10 (€220)
2 * OCZ Vertex 60GB (these will be retired to notebooks once the Vertex 3s are available, use these for Linux and Ecomstation - OS/2 is hillariously quick on SSD)
2 * OCZ Vertex 2 80GB (RAID 0, main OS/Apps volume)
3 Radiators, 360, 240 & 120 (mixture of XSPC RX and TFC Xchanger) (€130 for the XSPCs)
2 Laing DDC 3.2 pumps on a EK Dual DDC Top (ordered the ver 2 this afternoon with a 250mm Res and full cover block for the 6970 oops another €200)
EK Supreme
EK Mosfet, SB and NB blocks for the Asus mb
be-quiet 650 P8 psu
Lian-li A70B
13 Noiseblocker PL2 120mm fans
24' LCD, 1920*1200
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
Sim Stuff
CH Products Fighter Stick, Pro Throttle and Rudders
TrackIR 4