Hmm... with that budget in 2006....

An overcooked Duron with noisy fans and leaky caps comes to mind.

In that case, it would be a Prescott on socket 478 with an 865GV chipset, the one without the AGP, with the integrated “extreme” graphics, running perhaps 1GB of DDR1 and an IDE spinner.

This is a fun hypothetical!

Hypothetically, I live down the road and have known your family for a bit. I would build you something with all spare parts and I'm sure I would've used the $100-ish on parts to make the best thing I could. (this is how I did it, too. I never made any money building PCs back then... or at all, really, 🤣)

I'd build with whatever case I could snag up or just loitering in the scrap pile. Most likely a bit yellow already. Possibly an exoskeleton. The timeless combo of ECS K7S5A and Athlon of some kind. Hopefully a XP. CPU might be a purchase. 1GB of DDR (any pair) so speed might not be great, but the internet is going to work a hell of a lot better. I would've had GF2 and some crappy ATIs laying around at the time. If we're trying to do some gaming together, I'd toss in the GF2. If it just needs to be an office PC, I'd toss anything AGP in. And with that, I'd be using the on-board audio and a 40GB Maxtor. If I didn't have a drive that large, I might be buying a new one, too.

Oh and you KNOW this bad boy would have windows XP on it with the authentic* install media in the bottom of the case. I used to do that a lot. XP would slow the F down after a while of being in the presence of internet, so reinstalls were frequent.

What I was running in 2006 was a MSI 478 board (mATX, can't remember else about it, only that it was red) and a CeleronD 2.8GHZ with 2x512 DDR400, which was BLAZIN' compared to the PIII 550 I upgraded from. I got it at a computer convention and paid less than $200 for it (fall 2005). First computer I ever bought. The Athlon computers we had were hot and slow, so we preferred the Intel ones. Off-loading the AMD stuff is just a good idea.

P.S.: This would be a 12-13 year old kid building your computer.

*Heh, "authentic"

A Dell Dimension of some kind. One of those ugly purple ones with the horrible P4s in them.

Typical broke kid build in 2006:

Codegen case with "420 Watt" feather-light power supply and many finger-shredding raw metal edges
AMD Sempron (socket A or 754)
VIA motherboard with integrated graphics, on closeout from Geeks.com
256mb DDR1 RAM
80gb hard drive (it was difficult to find anything smaller)
Windows XP Corporate edition installed from a "borrowed" CD-R

Maybe you could get a Mad Dog Multimedia GeForce MX 440 SE or even a FX5200 (64 bit) as an upgrade later if you begged for it enough. That was the only brand the local Best Buy had to offer. Still wouldn't run any game you wanted to play acceptably.

Athlon XP 1600+ (socket A), ECS K7S5A Pro with bulging capacitors, 512MB of DDR-200 (PC2100), a Matrox G400, extremely hissy and noisy onboard SiS AC'97 audio, a 40GB IDE Deathstar, and a very questionable power supply of unknown origins. In an extremely heavy, unwieldy, and loud 4U rackmount case, with a Sony 52X CD-ROM that resonates the entire case at full speed and probably knocks more bits off the glass Deathstar platters while doing so. Windows XP Service Pack 1 because SP2 blacklisted the FCKGW key.

Actually usable, except for the video card. Upgrade to a Radeon 7200 and you can probably just barely play some 3D games from 2003-2004.

A Sempron 2600 with XP Home on it. nForce3 board (with onboard audio and ethernet). A Geforce 6200/Radeon 9000. The most aluminum case you can find. Forget F.E.A.R, you'd be running Lego Star Wars and $DISNEY_MMO_WITH_PSO'S_WORD_SELECT$

Oooo.. I built something recently that might match.

PcChips M810L

Soldered on 1.26Ghz Duron and 256MB of RAM onboard. I gave it a 32mb Geforce 2MX 200 and a 40GB western digital hard drive.

Ah, the days of the FCKGW- key… had to deal with plenty of those back then…

Sempron 2400 + K7S41X + 256MB in a beige box. Janky PSU, 40GB HDD. Only using the internal SiS Graphics which are abysmal. This sounds about right for me.

I feel like alot of the suggested specs would still cost more than $100 in 2006 - IMO $100 would be a beat up ex-office equipment pentium 3 with a graphics card just fast enough to run windows, especially if it was a whole kit (box, monitor, mouse/kb, speakers etc). Which coincidentally is pretty close to what you actually got. It's also the kind of computer that would have been put kerbside in the mid 2000s (i.e. the kind of system that people give away for free or as hand-me-downs). Maaaybe it could have stretched to a later model P3 (800-1000Mhz) or early P4 if it was just the box only.

Well, it sounded like machine only, no screen etc. And for what it's worth in 2006 Core2 came along.. AMD K7 was basically low end by then and Athlon 64 was a thing. I actually picked up a similar system to what I've mentioned before in that time-frame as my Teamspeak 2 Server.

Major Jackyl wrote on 2026-03-11, 22:48:

This is a fun hypothetical! […]
Show full quote

This is a fun hypothetical!

Hypothetically, I live down the road and have known your family for a bit. I would build you something with all spare parts and I'm sure I would've used the $100-ish on parts to make the best thing I could. (this is how I did it, too. I never made any money building PCs back then... or at all, really, 🤣)

I'd build with whatever case I could snag up or just loitering in the scrap pile. Most likely a bit yellow already. Possibly an exoskeleton. The timeless combo of ECS K7S5A and Athlon of some kind. Hopefully a XP. CPU might be a purchase. 1GB of DDR (any pair) so speed might not be great, but the internet is going to work a hell of a lot better. I would've had GF2 and some crappy ATIs laying around at the time. If we're trying to do some gaming together, I'd toss in the GF2. If it just needs to be an office PC, I'd toss anything AGP in. And with that, I'd be using the on-board audio and a 40GB Maxtor. If I didn't have a drive that large, I might be buying a new one, too.

Oh and you KNOW this bad boy would have windows XP on it with the authentic* install media in the bottom of the case. I used to do that a lot. XP would slow the F down after a while of being in the presence of internet, so reinstalls were frequent.

What I was running in 2006 was a MSI 478 board (mATX, can't remember else about it, only that it was red) and a CeleronD 2.8GHZ with 2x512 DDR400, which was BLAZIN' compared to the PIII 550 I upgraded from. I got it at a computer convention and paid less than $200 for it (fall 2005). First computer I ever bought. The Athlon computers we had were hot and slow, so we preferred the Intel ones. Off-loading the AMD stuff is just a good idea.

P.S.: This would be a 12-13 year old kid building your computer.

*Heh, "authentic"

I like this! The one we got did have non-genuine XP SP2 installed. Eventually my dad ended up contacting MS I think, because we got a genuine XP disc delivered? Hope he didn't have to pay for that. The HDD in it was only 10GB, so even 40GB would have been very much welcomed. And we had LimeWire on there, plus god knows how many toolbars and crap slowing it down even more. Formatting was a foreign concept - not sure how we used it until 2009.

onethirdxcubed wrote on 2026-03-12, 00:14:

Maybe you could get a Mad Dog Multimedia GeForce MX 440 SE or even a FX5200 (64 bit) as an upgrade later if you begged for it enough. That was the only brand the local Best Buy had to offer. Still wouldn't run any game you wanted to play acceptably.

It had a pretty mismatched Radeon 9200/9250, which was bottlenecked by the PIII. I rebuilt it from spec a couple years ago and tested some of the games I was playing like AvP2, WarCraft 3, Zoo Tycoon 2, etc. They were running ~15 FPS with dips below 10. If you looked away from NPCs or anything CPU intensive, the FPS might skyrocket to double or triple that for a second. Despite that, I never noticed anything wrong with it...so my standards of what was "acceptable" were very low.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-03-12, 06:08:

I feel like alot of the suggested specs would still cost more than $100 in 2006 - IMO $100 would be a beat up ex-office equipment pentium 3 with a graphics card just fast enough to run windows, especially if it was a whole kit (box, monitor, mouse/kb, speakers etc). Which coincidentally is pretty close to what you actually got. It's also the kind of computer that would have been put kerbside in the mid 2000s (i.e. the kind of system that people give away for free or as hand-me-downs). Maaaybe it could have stretched to a later model P3 (800-1000Mhz) or early P4 if it was just the box only.

Well at the time, £100 would have equated to more like ~$175. Monitor was not necessary, as we would have carried on using the CRT we already had. And K7/Willamette/Northwood were getting old in the tooth by that point.

Many of you are still speccing too much RAM. The cost of DDR was falling fast in 2006 as all the newer platforms with DDR2 came along but 256mb was still common in the cheapest prebuilts. Upgrading to 512mb made Windows XP SP3 happier but more than that wasn't really needed for XP especially if you still had dial-up or slow DSL and hadn't discovered browser tabs yet.

Vista wasn't happy and usable without at least 2gb of RAM so I made a little money from 2006-2008 downgrading people's new computers to XP.

Getting anything good with $100 was always only possible with "i dont know what its worth" hand me down deals.

2006 wasnt an optimal year for bottom barrel priced hardware. Expensive Core2s, dethroned but still expensive Athlon 64s, slow and still expensive P4s, garbage Celeron P4s.
2007 on the other hand Intel released Conrole-L Celerons, a spiritual successor to Celeron 300A. $40 Celeron 420 overclocked from stock 1.6 to 3.2GHz out of the box, 3.6-4 GHz with voltage bump and good motherboard. At 3.2GHz $40 Celeron beat best $1000 CPUs of year 2005 (FX-57, P4 EE). Add 2007 $110 GA-965P-DS3 and you had bottom dollar solid performer using brand new parts with ~10 years of life left in it with subsequent upgrade to overclocked Q6600.

I don't think you could do much better than a used top-end Pintium III or a early socketA PC with some low-end graphics card if you are lucky or integrated if not. From what I remember about currency exchange rates, after checking some PC gaming magazines from 2006Q1 a Celeron D or a Sempron alone would pretty much devour all the budget.

In 2006 I was running a Supermicro X5DAL w/ 2x Xeon 3.06/533 CPU's w/2GB ram and a Radeon X1600 Pro AGP. Rocked back in the day.

This was 3 years newer but on same topic: when I built a cheap computer with extra parts I have laying around using P4 processor, Asus P4C800 and HD3650 AGP card, and to top off cake icing some ram. This was to get guy off my back who was needy and kept breaking theirs parts trying to build some kind of computer for being clumsy. Since then I have not heard from the guy ever since. Which is what I am glad and I don't want to deal with this guy.

Cheers,

Twisted Six wrote on 2026-03-12, 21:25:

In 2006 I was running a Supermicro X5DAL w/ 2x Xeon 3.06/533 CPU's w/2GB ram and a Radeon X1600 Pro AGP. Rocked back in the day.

In 2006 I started using a SE7525RP2 with 2x Xeon 3.0/800/2MB CPU's with 2GB DDR2-400 and a Geforce 6200 TC PCIe. Still rocks today.