Once more, with thrift

Let's try for something less expensive but still plausible, shall we?

• BIOSTAR N68S3+ AM3 NVIDIA MCP68S Micro ATX AMD Motherboard and AMD Athlon II X2 245 Regor 2.9GHz Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor; a Shell Shocker at newegg.com today for $90, which is $30 off the usual price. It's no Phenom, or even a quad core, but reviews of the CPU are almost universally positive, some saying they've successfully overclocked to 3.5 GHz. The motherboard is low end (no gigabit ethernet, won't handle a CPU that takes more than 95W, PCI Express 1.0, DDR3 1333) but serviceable.
• HITACHI Deskstar H3IK10003272SP (0S02860) 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive for $80.
• Same DVD burner as before, for $20. They're pretty much a commodity nowadays.
• Same case as before... but this time the default power supply will do.
• Same RAM as before.
• Palit NE5S450SF1101 GeForce GTS 450 (Fermi) Sonic 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card for $130. Decent mid-range card, nice and short to fit in the cute little Micro ATX case, doesn't require more than the X-QPACK2 power supply can deliver.

So... ignoring shipping and handling, that's $480, I believe... or $510 if you don't get the Shell Shocker special. There's a motherboard that has gigabit ethernet and PCI Express 2.0 (allowing the graphics card to shovel data as fast as it's designed to), the BIOSTAR TA880GB+, for $80; with the Regor at its stock price, that replaces $90 with $140 and thus takes you up to $530--but since the Shell Shocker is almost done, it's fairer to compare it with the $510 price. If you're going that far, though, you might as well go ahead and get the Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H for $100 and future-proof yourself with USB 3.0, eSATA, and 6 Gb/s SATA, so $550.

I feel a little better now.