Building a starter PC for under $300

My oldest son, Adan, has wanted to upgrade his computer for a long time. To be honest, I can't blame him. He has been using a P3-600MHz beast that I built back in 1998! I told him that if he saved up his money he could buy the pieces to make his own computer that would be be a good starting point for future upgrades for about $300 CDN. After about 6 months of saving he finally had enough and I started looking to see what I could get.

He isn't a big gamer so the only thing it had to run was Runescape and Flight Sim X. I did some research and it looked like a motherboard using the AMD 780G chipset would be a good starting point. This would support AMD processors all the way up to the new Phenoms but we could start with a dual core 4400+ for $72. The motherboard also has an integrated ATI HD3200 video card that is capable of decoding a Bluray stream even using a cheap Sempron CPU. The HD3200 can also use Hybrid Crossfire to connect to a HD3450 or a HD3470 if you want better gaming performance. This would still be nowhere as good as a dedicated 8800GT or other midrange gaming GPU but it would only cost an additional $75 vs $200.

So, in the end we got:

Biostar TForce TA780G M2+ AMD 780G mATX AM2 1PCI-E 2PCI SATA W/RAID Video Sound GBLAN Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Dual Core Processor Socket AM2 Brisbane 2.3GHZ 2X512KB 65NM 65W Retail Box
Apex PC-373 ATX Mid Tower Case Black 4X5.25 1X3.5 4X3.5INT 400W W/ Front USB & Audio
Corsair Value Select PC2-5300 1X1GB DDR2-667 240PIN DIMM

I dug up an unused 250GB SATA HD and an unused copy of Vista Ultimate and in the end including shipping, taxes and insurance it cost $271. Not bad for a machine with a fair amount of upgrade potential and that also does everything that Adan wants to do right now.