Your price "Sweetspot" for a new desktop?

i like to build my desktops, so i'm around 1500 with a good videocard - i don't go too crazy, but like to make sure it plays everything and it's upgradeable in the future.

you should get it all for $3k - speakers, keyboard/mouse, flat screen.

$2500, but my budget only allows about $1200

6 months is the usual product cycle, so that's pretty much a given.
Personally I think it's not the best idea to buy the most powerful, and hence most expensive, components just for the small performance benefit of about 10-15%.
Most of the time you'll only see the difference in benchmarks, so who gives a flying..?
I mean, if you've got the cash rotting in your account then go for it but I certainly have better things to do with it then boost my e-penis.
So.. For a desktop I'd probably go with 2000 at the max, for the system only though.
Another thing I'm personally all for is peripherals and display.
What good does a really nice machine if your screen ghosts or is blurry in general.
By the way, shelling out a couple of thou for best parts to get the best results is fairly easy. Putting together a really good system with not as expensive parts requires knowledge and a good part of attention to details.

I would approximately 2K would do it for me, but an additional 500 dollars added to the 2k would make for good measure so I can get that top-o-da-line graphics card.

JFvergara aren't you living in Japan? So are you gonna consider the heafty shipping expense also?

The extra $500 I would spend on the speakers or etc.

My budget for the next desktop is $1800 without display/speakers/inputs/OS, or $2400 with display/inputs/OS. I found $1800 is enough for nearly all of the top-of-the-line technology, except for the really high end processor and SLI. My only concern is whether I should add $360 to the total cost just to add SLI.

Well, i built a machine for a friend about 5 months back. It had:

Antec SuperLanboy Case
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum Mobo
2x 512MB Sticks of OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev.2
Sapphire X800XT Graphics
74GB Western Digital WD740GD Raptor
500W Ultra PSU (The shiny silver one)
AMD Athlon64 3200+ Winchester
Creative Audigy 2 ZS sound
The Optical drives, storage Hard disks and floppy he carried over from his old comp.

And he got all that for about US$1500. IMO, that's a pretty sweet price point, great performance. Now, with the introduction of the Nforce4 chipset, it's a must buy component. Also, if you wanna go slightly cheaper, the X800XL is a great bang for the buck card. I think one of the versions of the X800XL had an extra molex and that overclocks alot better than the others and is about the same price. I would probobly also replace the Ultra PSU as ive heard some pretty bad things about it over the past few months. Maybe an OCZ Powerstream or Modstream in the 400 - 600W range cant remember the exact steppings.
Now with SLI, if you never want to get SLI, then it's definately a Nforce4 Ultra board with an ATi card, if you want to keep your options open, then a Nforce4 SLI mobo with a 6800 series card. I would probobly suggest a 6800GT for future SLI upgradability as well as having very good performance in today's games.

Maybe later, when Venice A64's come out in full force, it's definately a Venice CPU for it's crazy overclockability (3GHz on air is OK with these babys).

And that's about it i guess. I would say the sweet spot would be around $1500 - $2000 USD

That's exactly the same for me...I mean down to the dollar...for both the $1800 and $2400 figures. Right now I want the capability to run SLI, but I'm torn between what GPU setup to use (for example using today's technology, should I go with two 6600GT's in SLI, or one 6800GT, or one 6800 Ultra, or 2 6800GT's in SLI). Also, I'm probably going to wait until Fall to build, just hoping to make sure that whatever I put together is semi-futureproof, especially with dual-cores and whatnot...

I am freaked out.

You should be, if you build your's first I'm just going to come and steal it, save myself $2000

Ok lets look at this...

I built my last desktop for Less than $700 Back, well i dont know how many years ago, but i know the CPU was built & first put into service in 1999... Other than that, it was all new...

AMD T-Bird 1.3Ghz
K7S5A Mobo
1GB SDRAM
2x 80GB 7200RPM HDD's
Geforce 2 MX200 32MB video card... (Just remember when i ordered it, it was TOP OF THE LINE... When was that?)
1x CD-RW Drive
& A Case...

Now, I have been playing games on this system for a very long time, and with the exeption of 1 game, i get atleast 30FPS on all my games and that 1 game is Doom 3...

So my next desktop, i will put a limit of $1200 on...

My laptop (See Sig), Was about $1200 After rebates...
It has a very old video card and still is kicking butt on all games, exept, doom 3...

This is my Config for the current sweet spot PC this includes.
Monitor, OS, Keyboad and mouse.

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
$179.00

Thermaltake Xaser III V1000A Black Chassis: 1.0mm SECC Japan Steel; Front Panel: Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail
$130.50

LITE-ON Black IDE DVD Burner Model SOHW-1693S Black - Retail
$53.99

Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM
$57.00

Logitech Internet Pro Desktop 967457-0403 Black PS/2 Wired Standard Keyboard Mouse Included - OEM
$21.00

crucial 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered System Memory Model BL6464Z402 - Retail
Quantity =2
$170.00

ViewSonic E90B Black 19" CRT Monitor 15-pin mini D-sub - Retail
$175.99

Microsoft Windows XP HOME Edition With Service Pack 2 - OEM
$91.95

Antec SmartPower 2.0 SP-500 ATX12V 500W Power Supply - Retail
$75.00

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Winchester Integrated into Chip FSB Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3200BIBOX - Retail
$190.00

eVGA 256-P2-N376-AX Geforce 6800GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI-Express x16 Video Card - Retail
$369.00

Total:$1,513.43 + Shipping.

All Prices from Newegg.com

I generally set aside $3,000 to $4,000 for a full desktop set.

But then I generally add new gadgets above and beyond the previous desktop set - this time was dual LCDs, photo printer and TV tuner. Last time was full surround speakers, 19" CRT and DVD decoder card.

Next time it's probably triple or quad LCD, dual high-end video cards, external RAID array and a smaller case (have the Xaser III series right now).

I usualy do the smae the sweet spot however is the price point where you get the mos bang for your buck. This is where i bleive that is at this point. However I just noticed I forgot speakers.

My budget is normally around $2k. The system in my sig ran $1800.