Hard drive prices are finally starting to go down.  1TB hard drive prices have dropped $30 in the last two months.  It will take longer for the prices to get down to the pre-flood levels but they will get there.  The rest of the changes were price fluctuations and replacement of discontinued parts with newer, faster, better versions.  

On the video card front the 2 GPU cards are gone from stores.  Single chip Nvidia GTX580's and ATI (AMD) Radeon HD 7970's are the current high end.  I imagine both manufacturers are cooking up new 2 GPU cards.

You can find the main Parts Lists page here.

We changed the recommended CPU for the $250 upgrade and $500 computer from a Socket 775 CPU to a Socket 1155 Pentium G850.  This brings even the basic computer up to a point where in the future you could upgrade to a quad core, Core i7 CPU.  The motherboard and RAM changed as well to accommodation the CPU change.   The rest of the changes were to replace discontinued models and the usual price changes, mostly down.

You can find the main Parts Lists page here. http://www.homepcbuilder.com/build-your-own-computer-parts-lists.html

We've gone through and updated all of the parts lists.  We changed the CPU, motherboard and RAM on the $1800 and up computers to the new Intel Core i7-3930K 3.2GHz LGA 2011 Six-Core CPU.  We also upgraded the video cards on the $2300 computer to the latest 2 chip model cards from Nvidia and AMD (ATI). 

 There were of course prices changes, mostly down with the exception of  hard drives.  In the past 2 weeks prices for hard drives have almost doubled.  This is being blamed on the flooding in Thailand where a lot of hard drives are manufactured.    To keep the cost of each parts list down we have downgraded the hard drives on the $1200 and up computers to 1TB drives. 

You can find the main parts lists page here.

We added a SSD section to the $1200 and up computers and upgraded the AMD CPU on the $800 computer to a quad core model.  The rest of the changes were replacements for discontinued models and price changes, mostly down.

You can find the main Computer Parts Lists page here.

There were a lot of price changes, as per usually, mostly down.  One thing I noticed that is just baffling.  On the $1800, $2000 and $2300 lists it is cheaper to get 12GB of RAM than 6GB of RAM.  We replaced a few discontinued models and on the  $800 computer we upgraded the video card from a 6850 to a 6870.

You can get to the main parts list page here. 

As usual most of the prices went down,  between $1 and $20 since the last update of the lists.  The only changes were updating a few of the motherboards and the recommended DVD burner.  AMD is set to release the new Bulldozer CPUs, which will run on socket AM3+, very soon.  We changed out the AMD motherboards to the socket AM3+ equivalents of the socket AM3 motherboards that were in the lists.  The LG burner that was in the lists has been discontinued.  We replaced it with a burner from Asus.

You can find the main computer parts list here.

We've got most of the video shot with Lesson 3 through 5 close to being finished.  Lesson 1 and 2 are similar in format to the Internal Component video lessons from the Home PC Builder 2011 videos.  They are pure information.  We're planning to have all 5 videos on the site and available for members to watch by the end of July. It will take about week after that to get them on DVD.  

This month it was mostly price changes.  Some a few dollars and some $10 and $30 changes.  The only changes to the hardware in the lists was the video card and case recommendations in the $250 Upgrade and $500 Computers.  An Nvidia 9500GT was replaced with a Radeon HD 5670.  The cost went up about $20 but I think its worth it.  The 5xxx series supports DX11 and can play all the latest games, just with all the bells and whistles turned off.  The case was replaced with a very similar one only with a higher wattage PSU to allow for the updated video card.

You can find the main parts list page here
http://www.homepcbuilder.com/build-your-own-computer-parts-lists.html

We just ordered two Kingston SSDs.  We're going to make a set of videos showing how to configure RAID 0 or 1, install Windows 7 onto the array and show some tips for getting the most performance.  RAID 5 won't be possible with just two drives but we can still tell the steps for setting up the area.  We'll also show a few different configuration utilities.  The steps are the same but the look is different in various utilities.  In RAID 1 or 5 if a drive fails there is a procedure to replace the drive and have the RAID array recover or reconstruct the missing data.  We will show this as well.

The main changes were switching from the socket 1156 to 1155 CPUs on the $800 and $1200 computers.  For the $1800 computer and above we are sticking with recommending socket 1366 until socket 2011 comes out later this year.  Going with a socket 1155 motherboard and Core i7 2600K is definitely an option for higher end systems.

We also doubled the recommended amount of RAM on the $1200 and up computers.  This is made possible by low RAM prices.  Windows 7 64bit loves RAM and the more you give it the smoother your system will run.

The other changes were mainly price updates and a few replacements of discontinued parts.

You can find the main parts list page here.
http://www.homepcbuilder.com/build-your-own-computer-parts-lists.html