Yes. I'm trying to build the whole thing (including monitor, mouse,
etc.) for under $1000.
I build my current system in January for about $600 US, excluding
monitor. I could have done it for about $150 less, but there was a big
electronics/computer convention in town, and they bought up every stick
of DDR2 RAM in the city. Had to wait two weeks for the stores to
resupply and pay full retail to boot: $250 for 2 gigs. Same stuff is
selling "on special" now for about $80.
As far as specs: After much research, I went with the Abit KN9, AM2
socket motherboard with the nVidia nForce 4 Ultra chipset, SATA and IDE,
RAID, 160 GB SATA HD, 80GB IDE HD (from the "old" machine. used mainly
for backups), IDE DVD burner, 8 GB RAM max, AMD Athlon 64 (single core)
CPU. Bought everything through Newegg, except the graphics card, a
GeForce 6600 256 MB PCI-X, which I got used -- one month old -- from one
of the guys in the local Linux users group ($50!!!), RAM as mentioned
above, and keyboard and mouse.
It's been running almost continuously since mid-January, except for 3
weeks in May, when I went on vacation and shut it down, and have yet to
have any problems or over-heating.
Oh! And Fedora Core 6 64-bit.
Stef