cheapest small form factor setup?

[sleepkyng]

basically i'm selling a mac mini to my parents and want to setup a replacement pc of a similar ilk.

i want something that i can keep my photos, movies and music on - and maybe once in a while surf the net. and i want it to be small, and cheap.

any ideas?

how cheap can i whittle it down to?

 

[dbuchmann]

Hey,

Not entirely sure if you already have an OS, monitor, keyboard, etc., but here is the system I'm going to slap together for a friend of mine (who already has all of the miscellaneous stuff):

MSI MBOX K9N6SGM-V AMD Socket AM2 GeForce 6100 GeForce 6100 Barebone

AMD Sempron 64 2800+

WINTEC AMPO 512MB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM

SAMSUNG Black 16X DVD-ROM 52X CD-R 32X CD-RW 52X CD-ROM

Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

About $275 shipped from newegg. He'll probably upgrade to a DVD burner later but even if you switched the combo drive for a DVD burner it's still less than $300 and Linux is free if you don't have a copy of Windows.

Sure it won't set any records, but if you're just using it for general media/surfing you should be fine. The only thing is it's not SFF. Sorry if that's way off base from what you had in mind (if it is hopefully it'll give you somewhere to start from).

Hope that helped,


-David-

 

[Fraggable]

I just built a system in the Apevia X-Qpack case and it was surprisingly simple and easy to work with. I would suggest it for a SFF case. It even has room for 2 5.25" drives and a 3.5" drive. It may be large as SFF cases go but it's roomy enough that wiring isn't a pain.

You can use any mini-ATX motherboard, though I'm discovering that the ASUS A8V-VM SE's onboard video doesn't do 1440 X 900 resolution. Being able to use standard-height PCI cards and such helps keep costs down.