The spec PC I've built cost me £740.90 for the barebones - motherboard, CPU, ram and graphics card. Hard drives, optical drives, monitor, case, sound card and network card are all absolutely fine so there was no point in replacing those. Essentially the stuff I bought was the absolute core of a PC and is very close to top spec. You simply wouldn't find this sort of PC on the high street, the closest equivalent I could find on is
this.
That's about £300 more than I've just spent, and has an inferior processor (3400+ compared to my 3500+), the speed of the RAM isn't stated which isn't a good sign and the graphics card isn't as good as what I've already got. The rest of the system is inferior to what I've already got or entirely unneccesary, so what's the point? I built my last PC without a problem and it's worked for 2 and a half years. It's not that difficult, nor is it that uncommon. You can get exactly what you want and much cheaper as well, it's just when shit like this happens that it becomes a nightmare.