Probably one of the few occasions I didn't have to scrounge much parts and which turned out surprisingly great, at least in my opinion.

This machine originally came to me free with a X300 (which killed itself with artefacts for no reason...), some Spire 420W PSU that was quite overkill for the rest of the machine, and a broken Pioneer DVDRW drive that is pretty much a lost cause.

Without much further ado, here's the final specs:

Case: Frontier GR08A-2

Sturdy case, unusually sturdy knowing Frontier can be a cheap choice most of the time - the other one I have from them is nowhere near the quality of this one. At all. And yes, it's the company behind the "YOU WANNA PRAY GAME?" meme. Yes, THAT case.

PSU: LC-Power LC-420H-12
Slightly better than the ANS PSU you will see in the photos. Not the brightest choice but I recapped it, as well as added a few factory-missing parts. OEM'd by Huntkey, the same people who did a few of Dell's PSUs (Vostro A100 and A180 being a few examples), so I can trust it to not go boom.

Mainboard - Winfast-Foxconn NF4UK8AA

Neat nF4 Ultra board. Doesn't stand out much. I would say the PLCC BIOS socket feels a bit too fragile.

CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3500+

Nothing much to say about it. Probably the fastest single-core 939 chip I could easily find without having to pay a premium, like I did with my other build (not posted here) and its 64 x2 4600+.

RAM - 4x512MB

Nothing special - just some run-of-the-mill PC3200 CL3 sticks. A bit hard to find since most I had were rated for DDR333.

GPU - ASUS EN8500GT/Silent/HTP/256M/A

Probably the best 8500GT implementation and one of the few to feature a SLi connector as far as I know of. The other 8500GT I have (Leadtek) doesn't include it.

My only nitpick is that due to being originally made as a Silent card, despite having a fan connector, it runs the fan full blast. I'll look if there's any way I can add a fan curve to it somehow.

SPU - SB Audigy 2 ZS PCI

HP OEM card. Had to manually install drivers as I would get a "No SB hardware detected" error (not completely accurate message but you get the idea) when trying to use the full Audigy 2 install ISO. Installed it as the onboard nVidia/Realtek soundchip has some horrible low pitched latency issues to the point where it's better to use a SB PCI card.

HDD - Hitachi Deskstar 164GB, SATA

Fast SATA drive. Fairly sure this is one of those infamous "glass platter" drives, so I'll probably look into replacing it with a Samsung - it sounds rather nasty despite checking 100% good in HD Sentinel on my main PC.

ODD - TSSTCorp SH-S182D ATA133 DVDRW

Replacement for the nasty Pioneer drive. Quite silent. Belt has been already replaced during a OG Xbox belt replacement as well, 🤣.

OS - Windows XP Pro SP3 "REMOVED"
Not much different from standard XP - the only things additional to it is a bunch of general use apps (Firefox 52.9 ESR, 7zip and a few others) as well as the usual SATA driver compilation slipstreamed into it. Oh, and all known updates for XP - a welcome surprise considering I do have the bravery to browse internet on it.

Finally, photos.