Originally posted by The Evil Tin Tin:
Only a little bit, a P4 ceapest one is like £115 of a total of about £800 or so, the biggest cost in the whole machine is usully the motherboard, normally about £80 to £150, but sometimes the graphics card as well, generally £30 for a TNT 2 or £300 for a ge force 3.Another large cost is the monitor £75 up to like $500 !. So the processor isnt that big an expense but it ranks pretty high in the overall cost of a machine.
Hmm.. usually P4 motherboards are way less expensive than the Processor. I can get a Shuttle AV40 DDR board for around ~$100 whereas the Socket 478 1.7 Ghz P4 is around ~200+. If you wanted a P4 2.0 Ghz, you'd be spending around ~$450 minimum and that right there could be half or a third of your total costs. Depends on the chip.

Depends how high-end you want your other parts to be.