so I've priced up what i think are decent parts excluding a GPU and it's come to £1208..... that is still A Lot Of Money.... but i would get a lot of use out of it
the last one I built lasted me over 10 years (admittedly with most of the parts except the CPU and MB being swapped out at some point)
what i was thinking of doing was building something decent but without a dedicated GPU to begin with since i'm not a big PC gamer & i'm more interested in it being good at General Purpose Things. so I can save a chunk of money up front and then add a GPU in later if I need it