Cost of a Bare-Bones Box?

[Will Saxon]

>     Is it possible to build an Opteron-based box for under a grand, if
> I re-use my existing NIC, hard disks, and video board (will they even
> work?):
> 
>     Adaptec 3950U2B hosting a pair of LVD drives
>     Adaptec 2400A IDE RAID hosting a quartet of WD 120GB Sp. Editions
>     ATI Radeon 7200 (aka Radeon VIVO)
>     Netgear FA310TX serving the outside world
>     Netgear FA302T serving the inside LAN
> 
>     Can I re-use my 500W ATX power supply?  What about my 1GB stick of
> registered PC2100 ECC?  Can I get an SMP mobo and just stick one CPU
> on it for now?
> 
>     Can I re-use my tower ATX case?
> 
>     This is being driven by the death of my wife's and son's XP box.
> I'm thinking of swapping my workstation out to them and building
> myself a spiffy new box, or swapping my crashbox out to them, my
> workstation out to my crashbox, and building myself a spiffy new box.

It should be doable. If you used an Opteron 240 on an MSI K8T Master2-FAR
board you would spend ~$600. That board is ATX-sized so it doesn't require
any special case.

Your RAM is too slow, and I don't know if you can run the memory bus 
asynchronously, so if it were me I would figure on buying more RAM. I think
you can get 1GB of Corsair Registered ECC DDR400 in a 'matched pair' of 
512MB modules for less than $400, so that would put you under your spending
limit.

I am not sure that would be a particularly effective use of $1000 though.

-Will