I came here back in 2003 and Learned, and eventually built my PC. 7 years later it's time to do something like it again. It's not a gamer, mostly intranet radio and network file server duty. I had a PC I was trying to groom into it, but it will not post (for the cost of it I'm not out anything yet.) I bought a 1tb Sata drive for it and a cheap old video card.
So far I am thinking of running FreeBSD 8, using it as the DHCP server on my network. I'll have to find a intranet radio broadcaster (currently running winamp with shoutcast dsp) and a way to share to my Xbox360, but I think I can run stuff in WINE for a temp work around, as well as Itunes.
The hardware is where I'm getting a little hung up. It's been years since I spec'd a system. Right now I am looking at cheap Asus boards with Athlon 64 procs. I'd like to mirror the the TB drive for fault tolerance (either hardware or software mirror). As of now, Tigerdirect's M2N68-AM and Athlon 64 5200+ is looking good for the money. Backing it up with 4gb of OCZ DDR2, keeps me in a tight budget. Suggestions, Detractors?