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Feel free to make improvements, suggest alternatives, point out things I forgot, update prices, etc.
Community Reviewed System #1
$64.90 Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H AMD 740G-based board. includes sockets for HDMI, DVI-D, VGA, gigabit Ethernet, six SATA 3.0Gbps ports with RAID capability, PCIe x16 expansion, two DDR2 sockets, S/PDIF out, etc. (9/11/2008)
$74.00 Processor: AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ Retail (Socket AM2) (9/11/2008)
$35.99 RAM: 2GB DDR2-800 (9/11/2008)
$119.95 Video: PNY Geforce 8800GT 512MB (9/11/2008)
$0 Sound: None — onboard motherboard
$0 Communications: None - use Ethernet on the motherboard
$108 Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB SATA Use 2 drives in RAID configuration. ($54 each) (9/11/2008)
$26.99 Optical drive: DVD-RW/CD-RW: Pioneer DVR-216D The Pioneer DVR-216D supports DVD reads and writes up to 20x, CD reads up to 40x, has a 2MB cache, and a SATA interface. (9/11/2008)
$69.99 Case: Antec NSK4480 The Antec NSK4480 has a rear 120mm fan, 3x5.25” and 2x3.5” external drive bays, 3x3.5” internal drive bays, fits ATX and microATX motherboards, and has front USB ports. It comes with the Antec Earthwatts EA380 power supply included. (9/11/2008)
$34.95 Speakers: Logitech X-240 In this price range, a good pair of headphones might make more sense. (9/11/2008)
$199.99 Monitor: Acer AL2216Wbd 22” LCD 300 cd/m2 brightness, 700:1 contrast ratio, 1680x1050 resolution, and its 5ms response time. Sales on LCDs now are fairly common, so picking up a better value or a larger monitor for the same money may not be hard to do for the patient buyer. (9/11/2008)
Alternative $689 Monitor: Dell 2408WFP 24” Better color, wider viewing angle, larger screen: (2008-12-26)
$19.99 Mouse: Microsoft Optical Mouse 3000 Many kinds of mice to choose from – pick one that fits your hand (9/11/2008)
$6.90 Keyboard: Logitech Keyboard Many kinds of keyboards to choose from – spend some time here picking a keyboard that is comfortable. (9/11/2008)
Total price: $761.65, not including shipping and handling, not including OS (9/11/2008)
The initial version of this list of parts started as the "Ars Technica System Guide: September 2008: The Budget Box" by Brian Won.
Feel free to make improvements, suggest alternatives, point out things I forgot, update prices, etc.
Community Reviewed System #2
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A “budget ECC” system.
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Community Reviewed System #3
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Rather than starting completely from scratch, how about starting from a Wikipedia: barebone computer – case, motherboard, power supply, and sometimes CPU and RAM -- and then adding CPU, memory, drives, keyboard, monitor, mouse, and OS? I see that many bare-bone systems run less than $200 (as of 2010-02-19):
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post-assembly testing
See TestTheHardware.
how to do part comparisons?
Reading the comment from Chad Geidel on the Gustavo Duarte blog sparked this idea: rather than giving some item a “rating” in isolation, I wonder if it would be more useful to compare items in pairs? Something like: “I tried both X and Y, and X is: (4) infinitely superior (3) significantly better (2) measurably better (1) about the same” or “I haven’t actually tried Y, because the specs on item X are better than the specs on item Y, so I bought X and it works as well as the specs say”.