It is actually not that hard to build your own, and yes there is a certain satisfaction in doing it, the only real scary thing is what if it doesn't work the first time you fire it up? If it gets down to you don't know if it is the motherboard or the memory or the graphcs card or the cpu and they all came from different places you have a major problem! I've built all of mine since my 386, though, including three 486s, 3 Pentiums and now an AMD. I only had one that didn't fly the first time, a bad motherboard that I finally convinced the vendor wasn't some kind of a setup problem. Building your own lets you do partial upgrades too, I even upgraded from a AMD 1.1 to a 1.4 before I really got it in service, the chip was only $125 then (more now).