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Are there any tricks to buying parts for a home-built PC? For instance, is any particular month a good time to get a video card?
And are there any building trends, like video cards will get cheaper in the near future?
And does anyone have some good advice in general?
Well, AlexPG, I personally don't have any idea on price trends of hardwares though I'm quite interested in them. However, theoretically, after hardware expo's where manufacturers introduce their new gadgets, the prices of the previous models fall down.
Since computer sector is an R&D oriented one, the companies prefer price skimming method to meet their R&D expenses by attaching high price tags to their new products. This is an assumption though, I did not closely examine if expo's have such effect substantially.
Knowing the feature set and life cycle of the components is useful because they determine upgradability and prices. For example those who unwisely went with socket 754 a year ago now have no access to dual core cpu's and can only upgrade to slower cpus.
If you are building your own rig soon, I'd wait a few more months for the Intel Conroes to arrive.