A few months ago I was in the same situation as you. I really wanted to upgrade what I had but it just cascaded into an almost completely new machine. I was able to keep my old DVD burner and player two old harddrives and keyboard, moniter etc but added all this below.
A Dell woul have surely been cheaper but I don't know if it would be compatible to what I put together.
I never built a computer before but it really wasn't too hard at all. Most dificult was setting up BIOS for the first time. Mechanically putting it together was quite easy and even fun. Theres so much help online for this stuff.
