I'm in the process of upgrading my box.
New parts ordered:
MSI K8T Neo motherboard (Socket 754)
AMD Athlon 64 2800+ (+Reasonably cheap fan)
OCZ 2x512MB PC3500 Latency Enhanced RAM
Sapphire (ATI) Radeon 9600XT Video Card 128MB
400W Power Supply
Total cost around $740. Of course this doesn't include all the parts I already have (case, hard drives, floppy, DVD+CDRW combo drive), but unless I'm forgetting something that's only another $200 or so. Tis true about getting alot of bang for your buck these days...
Now UT2k4 will really fly
Any other good new games I should check out? I'm already thinking about PC Halo (which I never played on console... Yuck, console FPS...). BTW, I find that I have plenty of time to play games in med school. I mean, it waxes and wanes with my exam schedules and other goings-on, but I have a reasonable amount of time to do stuff. This of course has increased since I have completely stopped going to class. Of course, I don't work out anymore, but that's the price I gotta pay I guess
For those of you who wonder, I do as well if not better on exams and such when I just study it on my own and not go to class.
My advice for anyone who's looking at a computer now is to consider your needs. My system is fairly mid-range, and I anticipate it will play all the current games really well, and future games very well to mediocre for another 2 years. Is it worth another $1000 for the latest CPU/mobo/memory/video card combination to extend the life of the PC another year? Nah, I'll just rebuild again then. If you don't intend on playing the hottest games on your PC, you don't even need this much PC, and you should easily spend less than $1,000 including monitor for a box. This should hold true for laptops as well. If I were to buy a laptop it would be something cheap. Who games on their laptop? I mean you can, but it's nothing like having a nice 21" monitor with full keyboard and mouse in front of you. Anything else can be comfortably run on today's reasonably low-end technology.
As for price changes, prices are always fluctuating. For example, memory prices have been going up steadily for a little while now, and who knows when they will hit the roof and come back down. My advice has always been to just buy what you want when you have the cash. Anything else is like playing the stock market. You can do research, you can speculate, but there's just no sure way to know. The only constants are that everything depreciates over time as new technology is introduced steadily. If you wait 6 months for what you want now, are you going to want the new thing introduced in 6 months that you haven't thought of yet?
BTW, I still think newegg.com is really cheap on alot of stuff. Alot of times what I do is check newegg first, then go to axion and/or pricewatch to compare. Most of this stuff I got from newegg, except for the motherboard which I saved $5 on by getting it elsewhere.