I’ve been pricing out components for my first new build in 20 years. (I’ve bought many ebay servers and a few mini PCs in between).
The parts are around $2k. But then I look at the amd ai max+ 395 PCs that are out or coming out shortly and I think I might be buying an already obsolete platform. For the same price I’d get 16 cores and over 2x the memory bandwidth.
I only built my current system because of a special deal at my employer where you could buy a 4090 for 400 dollars, and this was only a couple of months after they came out.
Before that deal happened I was realizing that pre built was going to be cheaper for the same stuff. However finding a pre built without an expensive high end GPU that could be credibly upgraded to have a 4090 want in the cards.