I've bought a brand new PC yesterday, the last time I did that was in 2005. Since 2008 or so I switched to Mac. But porting my Little Crane game to Windows was too much of a lure, and my Mac Mini with Windows installed was not cutting it.
Building your own PC from components was, and still is a lot of fun. This is what I ended up with:
Intel core i5 4570 CPU. I would have preferred a low power T or S model, but those were not in stock at NCIX.
To keep the 84W CPU heat out of the case, I went with a maintenance free water cooling kit: Corsair H100i.
To keep the system relatively compact, I chose a mATX motherboard with H87 chipset: the Asus H87M-PLUS. The more expense Z87 chipset is really only req'd if you want to do overclocking.
A premium mATX case (Corsair 350D) with a nice aluminium front on a steel casing.
Wireless network adapter PCIe from Asus.
8 Gbyte of ram from Kingston.
Samsung 840 Evo SSD, and also a very cheap DVD writer.