As you're someone who uses Linux, do you game on Linux?
Always used to hear nvidia is better on Linux (using the official driver and not nouveau)

Also why I used nvidia because I knew it would "just work", or as close as Linux gets to just working.

Even the one I bought last week has already come down in price.

No, I don't game on Linux... haven't really had any problems with free radeon drivers in the past though I understand some of the latest gpus aren't well supported, pretty sure the R7 is ok.

Not seen anything with that spec on sale here for any price.

I meant the SSD. Don't think I'll see much or any reduction on the base system.

Oh yeah, I see what you mean. Hadn't checked prices in a while.

I agree with Ant. If you're struggling to afford it, personally I'd drop the RAM to 8GB (tbh) and go for an SSD. RAM is easy to upgrade in the future, and you'll get a faster and more responsive system in general out of an SSD/8GB RAM than you will from a mechanical HDD and 16GB RAM.

75 bucks still won't buy much ssd here. What slows me down isn't booting or launching programs (both which I do infrequently), it's swap thrashing. So a small SSD might "feel" faster out of the box, I'm not sure that would translate into significant time savings for actual productive use moreso than lotta ram. I can wait for ssd prices to fall more before making the plunge.

Why not get a small SSD and have that solely as a scratch/swap/page file area then?

I would do that if I was going to keep my current, 2GB pc. For the stuff I do, 16GB it will rarely hit swap.

Anyhoo... PHEW! I was all set to wrap up the order, when I happened to notice the Athlon X4 processor was listed as "socket AM4". The selected motherboard is AM3+. X-S (the motherboard spec said it was compatible with "Athlon" processors)

The good news is, I found an AM4 mb that supports twice the memory (32G DDR4) and I can get a single, 16G stick for a bit more than 2x8G DDR2 (which would max out the other board). Also, AM4 is Ryzen compatible (for future upgrades).  (dance)

Is there still a benefit from running two sticks for a dual channel speed improvement?

Ah, the pitfalls of incompatible hardware.

I like this site for getting around those:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/

It'll continually whittle the parts options down to only those that are compatible depending on what other kit you initially choose.

Yeah maybe. OTOH if I want to max out the memory later, that's ~$200 in the bin.

I'm usually pretty careful about buying new parts. I've been caught out by cannibalized parts (latest was trying to put "mac" memory in a pc, which is 1 notch off). Oh yeah, also had to put a new PSU into my case upside down.

I think part picking has come a long way, it's easier now than back in the day of Pentium 4s having specific RAM, DIP switches and the murky waters of setting IRQs for sound cards.

There are still a few gotchas, but there's a ton more resources to check you're getting it right.

Speaking of all this, I'm planning a PC upgrade for the missus. Custom PC this month featured an AMD APU build for under £400. I might hang on a month or two though, as they suggested you'd need to flash the motherboard's EFI to get it to recognise the CPU. Newer builds of the board should already have that in place. Not that I'm adverse to doing these things myself, but it keeps the onus on them to get it right and saves any returns/customer service hassle should the update go wrong for me.

Not got the parts list with me at work, but I'll see if I can find it tonight.

I was playing with part pucker last night and it gave that warning for rysen CPUs and mobos needing flashing.

The worrying part is that it said that in order to do the flashing, you'll need to have a different, recognised CPU installed to be able to do it :/

Placed the order after giving MrsD. a heads up. By waiting a day I saved another 5-bucks on the GPU! Now I've got to figure out a case (there are a couple of candidates home), and a Windows. Looks like I'm going to have a busy Easter.

Something to do with spectre/meltdown?

I've wondered that too. It's totally useless. If you've got a suitable CPU you're probably not looking to upgrade.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/amd-sending-out-free-processors-to-solve-firmware-flashing-catch-22/