A couple of years ago I started with an empty box, and I'm still very happy with
the system. AMD Phenom II X2, 4 GB of memory, Nvidia 9600 GT video, WD Black 640
GB hard drive.

I suggest you have a look at the PCMech web site. People there will tell you to
spend more money on a really good power supply (which I did) and only worry
about your video card if you play a lot of Windows games.

Barry raises an excellent point about hard drive prices. $160 for a WD Black 750
GB drive, WOW! Not long ago it was $60.

In two years CPUs have hardly changed, but USB3 and 6 GB SATA have arrived, and
SSDs have become more popular.

I don't want a CPU that runs at 3 GHz with 16 processors, I want a CPU that runs
at 16 GHz with two processors!