It was fairly easy, and remarkably cheap... much of what I bought came from a combination of sources, like Compusa, ComputerShopper, and other vendors.
I stopped doing it in 2009, when my last desktop finally crapped out, and regular off-the-shelf PC desktops got very cheap, so they were a better deal than building my own... and I used one for a while... until it, too, crapped out. Since then, I've been using my laptop.
So, now that I'm working rather intensively in my own office, and nervous about the lifespan of the laptop I've been using for a few years, I went looking for a good desktop solution... one that would permit me to go back to using 5 monitors, which is especially convenient for the kind of work that I do.... I often have 3 or 4 big applications running, at the same time, and am doing a lot of cut & paste between them, so multiple monitors is a big advantage... the laptop only permits 2 monitors... itself, plus one other.
I scanned the available desktops, but saw no good deals... performance machines were all over $1000, and most don't have the requisite slots for the additional video cards.
So, I'm building one again. A high performance Gigabyte motherboard, 16Gb ram, Intel i7-6700 processor at 3.4GHz, and Windows 10 Pro. Once it's built and loaded, I'll clone the HDD to a SSD, for even better performance.
As it turns out, the total parts cost worked out to around $680, versus $1000 for comparable commercial machines... so, it look like building one's own is a good deal again.
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