Hey, guys. I'm planning to build my first PC at the end of this year or beginning of 2016. I have a build in mind and I'm saving my money for the components (won't have all the money till January probably). I'm wondering if I might save some money by purchasing the components as I can afford them throughout this year (mostly trying to catch sales) and then assembling it all once I have it all bought. Nobody seems to be doing this and I'm wondering why. My main concern is that I'll have bought parts and kept them in the boxes for several months before installing them in my first PC only to find out that not only are they defective, but I bought them too long ago to be able to return them. Thoughts?
Get your money together and plan to buy all at once.
I would HIGHLY recommend that you try and get your affairs in order so that you can buy parts on black friday, tech monday, and any other christmas related sales.
You will save a good chunk of money that way.
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Keep your money and buy them all at one. With exception of the case, fans, and possibly the heatsink (all Intel 115- sockets use the same mount dimensions, and all AMD sockets use the same dimensions).
Like @Tjj226_Angel said, you can get great deals in Christmas and January sales. By the time you've got the money together, there could be better components out than the ones you would buy for the same money. You don't want to be sitting on a pile of old hardware.
Well it depends. if there are any really amazing sales, you may want to pick up something early.
Personally i built my pc over the course of about 3 months, buying parts as they went on sale.
But one thing is, you need a way to test for faulty hardware. If you dont have means to, it could be not as good of an idea to put too much time between purchases.
As others have said Black Friday to Christmas are "usually" the best deals on everything. Keep an eye out on http://reddit.com/r/buildapcsales and http://slickdeals.net for deals.
you can use Pc partpicker or camelcamelcamel or prize zombie to track price history on things so you know when deals are actually deals.
operating system is something easily purchased at any time. if you are needing windows, windows 8.1 has dropped to 79.99, and if you see it at that price, you should just get it early. Of course linux is free and always available.
Other things such as: Case, Hard drives/SSDs, optical drives, cooling (fans, heatsinks, TIM, etc), peripherals (mouse, keyboard, headphones/speakers, monitor) could all be purchased pretty much worry free, as its not likely any big changes are going to happen with them from now until you build.
Ram and power supply are also things which may be purchased early (but psu is something you def want to test), and although ram generally is something you can purchase at any time since it really never changes, BUT by the time you finish your build, the next generation intel cpus will likely have been released, and they can use DDR4 memory (they can also use DDR3 from what ive read).
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Yes - case, input devices, fans.
No - cpu's, motherboards, ram, gpu's, ssds/hdds.
Unnecessarily eating into DOA and warranty periods is silly. Add to the the tech changing every months.
My rule of thumb is to order everything at once and to have each individual component gift-wrapped so it's like Christmas morning only instead of them being delivered by a fat man in a red suit, they're delivered by a fat man in brown shorts.
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