It's time for the Bobulator VII to be built, and I've got most of the parts ready.  This won't be a complete rebuild since I don't really need a new sound card and I'm too poor to drop $650.00 on a video card, but I think this stuff should last me another 18-24 months.  I'll probably replace the video card with a 6600GT or something similar early next year though.

Soyo SY-KT880 Dragon 2 (v2.0) motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Thermaltake Volcano 12 Heatsink
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste
(2x) Western Digital 80GB SATA in RAID 0
(1x) Western Digital 200GB ATA133
(1x) Plextor Pimptastic DVD/CD Burner

I think 4GB of copper-plated OCZTech PC3200 DDR in a dual channel configuration should be more than enough, so I won't need to replace that any time soon.  I decided to stay with 32-bit for one last "hurrah", but Athlon XP motherboards are becoming very hard to find, so this will definitely be the last iteration.

I'm a huge fan of Soyo for performance workstation motherboards.  Outside of the one that caught on fire (which was my original Soyo K7V-Dragon+ because the plus means better), I've never had any trouble with them.  They offer tons of features, rock-solid stability, and a decent price.

As far as the drives, I went with cheap 80GB SATA's for the "system" drives and an old 200GB ATA133 drive for unimportant storage, like game installs and temporary download space.  Since I store everything on the server, I'm not concerned with excessive storage space on my workstation.

So, what do you guys think?  For a poor man's system, I think it'll do just fine for at least a year to a year and a half.  I think the Bobulator VIII will be a complete rebuild, like the Bobulator IV was.  New case (*gasp!*), all new optical and data drives, new sound/video/RAID cards, new power supply, everything.  I'm going to try to pay off my car a couple years early (Dave Ramsey style), and if I can finish that off by next fall, I'll try to devote my cash to a totally new Bobulator.  I might even splurge on a new monitor (19"LCD?) and some uber-speakers (Creative Gigaworks S750, baybee!).

-b0b
(...will be happy for now.)

Mine lasted over three years before that stick of ram decided to catch on fire.  The chipset fan started emitting the whine of death about a year ago, so I tied the fan to the shroud with a zip tie.  It still worked just fine.

-b0b
(...wonders why Soyo stopped packaging the drive bay?)