I finally bit the bullet and ordered replacement part for my “Ghetto Box” PC. “Ghetto Box” is not meant to be deragotory. I envision that this box would have all of the characteristics an office worker needs. Since game playing and video editing is not on the agenda this box should be quite adequate with today’s office software.
AMD makes some nice processors and are generally winning the price to performance gig. I have been happy with the boxes I have put together with AMD processors in the past. However, I am looking for a processor less than $100. The Celeron from Intel is less inexpensive the AMD folks and remarkbly powerful so it has caught my fancy. I have been really pleased with the reliability I have gotten from my old Intel 815 motherboard and PIII.  The Intel chipset has earned my favor.
My selection for the box is a MSI 865GVM3 motherboard($52 Newegg) matched up with Celeron 326($57 Newegg). I put in 512 MB of Corsair Value memory to round out the package. As you can see this box will be inexpensive. I tested it out with my existing disk drives but I ended up getting a refurbished SATA drive for a longer term solution. The motherboard has a built-in Intel graphics adapter which I have found to be plenty adequate for my needs. I picked the MSI motherboard because it supports the LGA775 processors, has the Intel chipset/video driver, and is less expensive than Intel. You can see that this all fits into a very modest budget.
So what am I going to do with this box? I am going to load server software on it. No kidding! Its going to be my “dogfood server”, my beta server, my linux server, my backup workstation, etc. I already loaded up a NFR W2K server on it and it is pretty snappy at doin’ nothing. I do not planning on recommending this as a production server but I do think I can test out new server software without any issues. I still think this combinaton is a nice upgrade/repair for the cost sensitive market.