Planning Phase:
With some advice from a friend I got acquainted with the intricases of building a new computer. He advised me to look out for whether the motherboard supported dual channel ram, which the barebones did not. As well, he informed me that the onboard video card was not really needed if I had an old style PCI card available, which I did. So taking his advice, I chose an ABIT motherboard with 1 GB of Mushkin RAM. I then proceeded to select the overly cheap Logisys CS-51WBK case which was in the barebones system. Next up I just chose a random yet small Seagate 80gb SATA2 hard drive.
With the deals and savings that were on that week I ended up spending $149.99 on the processor, $225.63 on the motherboard and ram (bundle), $47.49 on the logisys case, $59.99 on the harddrive. My total worked out to be $565.10 including shipping and taxes. Not a bad price, I must say.