By way of comparison...I recently built an economy machine...$600 AOpen motherboard AMD 1.8GHz CPU Integrated AC '97 Sound Radeon 7000 Graphics Card 100GB Maxtor HDD 512MB Kingston RAM Net Gear LAN Antec 400 Watt Power Supply Off the shelf ATX case Windows XP Pro SP2 Runs like a rocket... This didn't include the monitor, which the client already had, but monitors can be picked up new for around $100...that would put the total cost of a system like this at $700 wannabe1