That's funny, because a quick look at the lowest prices on motherboards at Pricewatch shows a good half of them being close to $200. Sure if you want low end you can spend $50, but if you want a computer to last a while....
Oh, and that was mobos ALONE, no memory, no cpu. In stores I haven't seen a decent mobo at under $100. Love to know where your shopping Sprig if you can get a *good* mobo for $50. The ones I investigated at that price had 90 day warrantees.
edit: Incidentally, Dell's 3-year warranty is $170. If you decide to go 2 year, it's less than $70. Both of those are ON SITE. Meaning you dont' have to do anything to get it fixed, jsut call 'em up and wait for 'em to show up.
Newegg has pretty good MB's for around the $70 range from what I've heard. They also have a reputation for excellent customer service. I don't like Pricewatch, they tend to recommend things that are superfluous or outdated, and I haven't had much luck finding what I needed with them.
Sprig, I'm curious, why three gigs instead of four? You could easily get 4 1 gig sticks for only a little more. Are you recommending that because of cooling problems with the sticks being too close to the CPU?
Also, it might be worth it to wait a little and grab a Penryn when they come out, since Intel is pricing them very competitively, they have enormous caches, and they're 45 nm. I'd probably wait some more to see how they do though.
Of course if it were me I'd go close to what Sprig recommended because I have to buy everything myself and I'm a teenager with a crappy budget. I probably wouldn't go with the 6000+ though, but that's because I'm into overclocking and would rather buy a cheaper chip and clock it to the same performance. I wouldn't recommend that though, its easy to destroy things if you don't know what you're doing.