Did I get a good deal for budget HTPC?

Get another gig of RAM & pls run WINDOWS VISTA HOME PREMIUM. But the hard disk in that build is not so great. A good hard disk(speed/price/space) is Western Digital 640GB.

The cheapest I found all your parts for were:

Antec P180 - $114.95 (It had some mail in rebates before on Newegg, but none that I can find now)

http://www.pccana.com/product_info [...] =USD&ref=1

Antec 350w - $43.99

http://www.fadfusion.com/selection [...] 0024406892

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G HDMI Micro ATX - 89.99

http://www.egoodz.com/product.asp?pf_id=GA_MA78GM_S2H

AMD Athlon X2 Black Edition 2400 Brisbane 2.3GHz - $49.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] %20Core%2c

1GB OCZ Special Ops Edition - $22.99 (After 10 dollar mail in)

http://www.axiontech.com/prdt.php?item=81342

They only had some open box units for the hard drive, but I mean you can get a 500 gb Sata for $102.06. Its a deactivated item the 320 gb, but if they had new ones now, I'm sure they would only be like 50 - 60.

http://www.buy.com/retail/product. [...] caid=17902

The dvd burner is 26.99 at http://www.xpcgear.com/shs223fbebn.html.

Assuming the hard drive is 40, then the total comes to a little over 400, so I think you did fine. With this motherboard, you can upgrade the hard drive to a Sata one and add another stick of ddr2. You can also upgrade the graphics card to a current one (PCI express generation 2), but that would be a waste considering this is only gonna be used as an htpc and the processor is a 2400 brisbane, which is good for an htpc system, but not for anything else. The igp (onboard video) is basically an rv610 (dx 10, hd decoding) so watching Bluray movies is fine and HD rips are fine. As far as watching the hd content online, I think a fairly fast internet connection (6 mbps+) and a good processor matters more. I just went to hulu.com and started watching an episode of 24 in 720p and its running ok, albeit a little choppy at some parts. I've watched 720p movie rips on my computer and they've ran fine, which leads me to believe my 6 mbps connection and older Opteron 144 processor can't keep up. I have an x1900 xt, which is more much more powerful than the rv610, but it lacks any Hd decoding features. I don't know. Here's the link to Hulu's Hd content:

http://www.hulu.com/hd/

When you get your computer and get it up and running (after installing all the updated drivers), go there and to Abc's website, as they have pretty good Hd content as well and test it out and let us know the results. Peace.