I had a bit of a motherboard failure, and my old desktop really needed a freshen up anyway. I was extremely surprised at just how cheaply you can build a very decent computer for...

I started out with an Asus M2NPV-MX Motherboard for $88.00 (Australian dollars) - what I really liked about this motherboard was the fact that it supports dual monitors with its onboard video card. I'm not a gamer, and really don't have a need for any high speed graphics card, so this was perfect for a development machine.

Next, picked up an AMD X2 4600+ (dual core) cpu for around $155.00 - absolute bargain at the moment, matched this with 1gb of 633mhz DDR2 ram for $63.00

So there it is - I've already got a hard drive / DVD drive, case, keyboard - but the building blocks of quite a powerful machine for roughly $300.00 is awesome in my books, how could you go wrong!