my new $263 budget rig

ASUS M2N-MX SE Plus with onboard Nvidia GeForce 6150 graphics $55
AMD Athlon X2 4000+ dual core $59
stick of Transcend 2 gigabyte DDR2 800 RAM $35
Lite-On DVD-RW drive $24
Asus TA-851 case with 350 watt PS $50
used an 80 gig HD I already had
Windows Vista Basic bought off ebay $40

total: $263

I needed a cheap system to replace a 5 year old Pentium 4 Compaq. Dual core is great. This system plays "GTA: San Andreas" smoothly. It won't play the very latest games but will play games that are 2 years old just fine. Plus it has PCI Express, so I can add a better card later to be able to play the newer games. All in all, a nice system for web surfing, email, podcasts, word processing, iTunes, and playing games that are 2-3 years old. The case is an el cheapo model but still looks nice, and the build quality seems higher than its price. This is about the cheapest you can spend on a relatively new system. I guess one could get a Pc Chips mobo for a few bucks less, but ASUS seems like a better vendor.

Nice work on a REAL budget build but yeah if possible buy a cheap graphics card of newegg. For you spend about 40-50 bucks

Great build. I might have to steal your design... I agree with AMDfangirl though. Get a 780g mobo. It'll only be 20-30 more. More than just graphics the 780g is also a lot better in other things too like USB transfer speeds.

Is $40 really the going rate for a legal copy of Vista on eBay?

yeah, it was $40 for the upgrade version (used) on ebay. I already had a full copy of XP, so I was able to use the upgrade version of Vista. I had to call MS customer service to activate it. I may go back to XP because of the toll that Vista takes on a system. Seems to run about 20% slower under Vista than it did running XP.

No bloated rubbish in vista home basic. Actually... there isn't much in vista home basic at all. I run vista Business N (which has Aero and other stuff that the home versions don't have, but has no WMP startup crap to balance it out) with only 2Gb RAM and I play crysis and other RAM hogs. More RAM would be nice, but it isn't necessary.

I like the aero GUI actually. The Vista Basic GUI looks worse than XPs.