Ok so after days of reading through tons of post and reading the HCL repeatedly...I've decided to scratch the SFF pc...and I've decided to make a system with a mATX board. I've got the base parts down and everything looks to be fully supported on these so hopefully it'll go well. By the way the key for me is that I wanted all parts to be as cheap as possible but with the ability to upgrade when I can afford to. I also do some light gaming so I wanted to be able to play some games in windows, HL2, Quake4...I decided to post this just in case someone else had the same requirements as me....Let me know what you think..

Here are the 3 main parts...the rest, case, memory, hard drive, and dvd are really not important


Motherboard:
Gigabyte GA-8I945GZME-RH Socket T (LGA 775) Intel 945GZ Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
$67.99

CPU:
Intel Celeron D 346 Prescott 533MHz FSB LGA 775 EM64T 64-Bit Processor w/ Execute Disable Bit Model
$59.00

Video Card:
SAPPHIRE 100156L Radeon X1600PRO 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Overclocked Edition CrossFire Ready
$89.99 also there is a 20 dollar MIR that expires today.


Total without tax or shipping at newegg:
$216.98

$196.98 after MIR

I'd go for the Saphire 100144L Radeon X1600PRO 256MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail instead. Because a) you wont see the difference in performance, it IS cheaper and C) as much compatible as the overclocked GDDR3 version anyway.

(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102651)

I have the 144L version and this card is as fast as my previous X600pro in OSX86 while it is supposedly faster. Ofcourse if you'd run Windows natively on it then it would be different I suppose.

Regards,

EPDM

ya i thought about it but the fact that it is crossfire ready...means i can always grab another one and increase my fps some...well if it ever gets supported in OSx86

also with the MIR the crossfire is 69.99 and I don't mind wait 1293402109 months to get 20 bucks back, i'm cheap

Ok so I've installed it all and now I have a new machine that triple boots xp media center, vista RC1, and mac osx 10.4.7

Everything worked pretty smoothly, installed xp with x1600, installed vista with x1600, created active partition for mac os, shutdown and removed x1600 and installed 10.4.6 with sse3 and gma 900 support, shut down installed sapphire x1600pro and used borisbadenov's installer, rebooted with boot manager into xp and installed acronis os selector. Now it triple boots.

Fixed soud by editing kext and installed skge driver for LAN.

Updated to 10.4.7 and now everything is smooth, even the Dashboard ripple effect that most people have problems with.

so if anyone is looking for a cheap start for a new pc I would definately suggest this setup! It works great!