My work has had several Anitec cases on sale for a while now. The asking price was $50 OBO, and an optional $20 for a power supply. They've been sitting on the floor for about two months, when a friend and I decided to make an offer on them. We each snagged one for $40, including a brand new 550W Anitec power supply and four new case fans.

To go off on a tangent, my current setup is kind of lame. I have an old 800MHz Duron sitting around, running 24/7 downloading random items onto a giant hard drive. I also have my two-year-old Dell laptop, which still runs fine but it starting to show its' age (i.e. I can't play any games from 2005 or later at a reasonable framerate).

I've decided over the next few weeks to save up some money and get a processor, motherboard, and some RAM for this new case. Perhaps even a video card, though I've been out of the game so long (no pun intended) that I have no idea what's been going on in the market for a couple years now.

So, after thinking about it for a whole two or three hours, here's what I'm tenatively purchasing for the core of my system:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ processor ($218)
Asus M2V motherboard ($105)
1GB PC5300 Corsair RAM ($135)

I'm still undecided on whether I should spend another $500 or so and make this system a gaming rig, or spend $600 or so and get an Xbox 360. I know I should probably just get a mid-range video card for $250 or so and go for the game console later on, but...so temping...