[Dinsdale]

Nothing ECS is a good buy (unless your time is worthless).

Abit or Asus. It's worth the extra few bucks to get quality hardware.

[ThePythonicCow]

Nothing ECS is a good buy

That's a possibility. I just put together a $300 rig of similar capacity (for use as a router) and used an ASUS mainboard. I don't have personal experience with ECS. My rigs are ASUS, Abit and MSI. My instincts would be to stay away from ECS myself, but I have no real basis for that.

For what I used, see: Image Viewer ASUS PUNDIT-AE3 AMD Socket 754 AMD Athlon /Sempron SiS 760GX 2x 184Pin SiS Real 256E Barebone - Retail $102.99. That's case, power, and mainboard for $102.99. Then I added an AMD Sempron 64 2600+ for $65, and a stick of 256 Mb RAM I had left over from another project, and an old disk that I had left over when I upgraded one of my bigger systems to bigger disks.