Hola! I have decided I'm gonna build my own PC and I only have ~600 dollars to do it (not including OS). Any suggestions on parts? Tips or important things to think about/remember when picking parts for a build and building?

Skylake vs Haswell? (like getting a skylake i3 vs haswell i5 or splurge and get a skylake i5)

Obviously with a cheaper build i'm gonna wanna spend a good-ish chunk on my graphics card. Suggestions?
this nvidia vs AMD?

should i bother with ssd now or save up money later?

Ok i think that's all. I appreciate any insight you all have. thanks! :)

GTX 960 vs R9 380

SSDs have dropped quite a lot in price since I bought one. I think it's a must-have. I don't know much about them though. Personally I have good experience with Samsung, and I've heard that you should avoid SSDs with Sandforce-controllers.

If you're going Linux get Nvidia.

awesome, thank you!

Also this, for another comparison.

As for SSD, I would say yes, definitely. But it does depend on what you're planning on doing. If you want as easy a setup as possible and are planning to store a lot of video and whatnot that uses a lot of storage, I'd recommend an HDD - for anything else, go SSD as the speed difference is massive (plus an HDD for extra storage, if you need that and don't mind a couple extra clicks to find your stuff).

ah i forgot to put down what i'm using it for. Gaming. it's primarily gonna be for gaming and putzing on the internet. why? would it be easy to upgrade to it later on? most cheap builds (500 builds) say to use i3 skylake so that you can upgrade later on.

Then it still depends on how many games you usually have installed at the same time, and how much space said games take. I mean, on a 256GB SSD, you'll be lucky to get 10 games of a comparable size to The Witcher 3 installed before you get complaints of "no drive space left" but you'll easily get a several hundreds of Fallout 2. But it's speedy, no doubt about that, in a while you'll have almost forgotten what "loading times" mean.

The big question here is, will you upgrade it?
Ofc, if you buy skylake i3 now you will be able to upgrade it in the future to i5, for now skylake vs haswell performance difference is about ~10% but you have to pay much more for decent mobo and cpu.
On the other hand, you can get better CPU right from the start and it should last longer (than i3) and it's overall cheaper (you can get a used i5-4460 much cheaper so "performance per dollar" is much better).

The thing with "upgrading in the future" is that most of the time you will want to change everything...

If you're on budget you can go for Skylake i3-6100 and DDR4 and upgrade for something better in 2-3 years. 8 GB of ram might be enough for now but i'd go for 16 (8x2) since it's cheap and not worry about it later. Best graphics card that can fit your budget would be R9 380X. As for SSD, you can grab 128-256 GB one for OS and later when the price drops grab new one with bigger space for installing games and storage of your data.

Don't buy the cheap hamster wheels for dynamo supply.

O____o

bump?

What OS ('s) do plan to run? Some of the new Intel CPUs are not backwards compat with older OS's I've heard, but don't know which ones. Somebody will know.

Just be aware if you do get a Skylake your OS will probably need to be windows 10 if you plan on using windows.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft-windows-support-policy-new-processors-skylake

A year or two ago, i built a gaming PC (the one i'm using now). Went with a combined combo package at NewEgg, then added a decent video card. Cost about $530.

I'd say regardless, don't go with the newest stuff that's available, go with what's 2-3 years old or heavily on sale. Not that long ago i saw how to get some older server quality motherboards and CPU's cheap, the whole setup (motherboard, memory and cpu) was like $150 for really good stuff.