On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <chrome at real-time.com> wrote: > Anyone have any good experiences with cases they want to relate? > > Any good advice on which CPU is at the sweet price point these days? > > In case you didn't know, I'm not physically in the Twin Cities area (I'm in > New Hampshire) so telling me to go down to Tran Micro is not useful. :) Are you near one of the MicroCenter locations? (No I don't work there, but their prices keep luring me back in the door!) If so, here is the shopping list for a decent computer I just built myself. I was inspired by an article about building a linux box for under $200, but I wasn't willing to stick with that budget. I would recommend a different motherboard than I used, though, as I can't get this thing to boot off a linux thumbdrive. Grr. I had to swap a CDROM in there to install. Gigabyte's updated BIOS didn't help at all, even though that was one of the fixes listed. I don't really feel like trying the beta BIOS. I actually ended up splurging for 4GB of RAM instead of 2 once I got to the store. Maybe that's overkill. This thing won't break any speed records, but my wife is impressed that she doesn't hear it when it's on. The CPU is a dual-core 3ghz, but under normal operation, I'm seeing both cores usually sitting at 800mhz. The BIOS tells me that the case fan (120mm exhaust) runs around 700-800 rpm. Case - Coolermaster Elite 331 mid-tower - $49.99 http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0250924 Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H (AM3) - $94.99 http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0334912 CPU - Athlon2 X2 250 (dual-core) - $62.99 http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0317382 Memory - Crucal 2x1GB DDR3-1333 - $54.99 http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0307433 Hard drive - have one... Total - $262.96 (add tax, and hard drive, optical drive, etc, if you need) Even with the 4GB of RAM, I was out the door for about $310. Not a bad price for new parts to make a working computer, and it should be easy to upgrade in the future. - Justin