I blame Jeff G. for my current situation. Whatever he did to break his computer has found its way into mine. Now my main PC is hosed. Won't even show the boot screen and those odd times that it does, it locks at random times.
So now I am without a primary computer. Luckily my server is ok and the wife's computer is running and my laptop, bless it's 5 year old little heart, lets me blog.
I swore I was done building computers, but looking at the cost of a prebuilt one compared to what I can get if I do it myself, I can't justify paying all that extra $ for shit I don't need (monitor, soundcard, network card, OS, video, etc).
Planning on going the Opteron route. But it's been so long since I've done any of this, I don't know what makes one chip better than the other. The Opterons are a bit cheaper and I've seen some machines at work that have them and they're unbelievably fast. We'll see.
Wish me luck!
Update
Just ordered the new system. Athlon 64 3200+, 1G RAM and a Lanparty Ultra-D nForce 4 motherboard. Should last me another few years, I hope....