Comment I'm there!!! (Score 3, Insightful) 211
No, seriously. I can totally justify spending around $350 for a HTPC with gaming to experiment with. Cheaper than my wife's purse.
$150 - AMD A10-6800K (with mobo over at Microcenter). Yes, I know Intel is faster and it's not the fastest GPU either but for $150 it's hard to beat the combo.
$80 - 8GB of RAM
$100 - 3TB hard drive
and I have a bunch of old ATX cases and power supply.
It's Linux, if I don't like it I can always put something else on like Mint.