No, I'm not going completely crazy.
At home, due to a variety of acquisitions, I currently have (lying around doing nothing):
1x Celeron D 345 (3.06GHz, 256K L2, 533fsb)
2x 512MB DDR2 (667, I think)
1x Palit 8400GS
1x AOpen 340B low profile mATX case
To be fair, the case isn't technically doing nothing. It currently houses my general office machine, which I've built from old components to be relatively energy efficient - a Duron 700 (30W TDP!), 512MB SDRAM, integrated SIS-based mobo, and that's about it. The whole lot pulls 60W - 70W - not half bad if I say so myself
The thing is, it's not a very flexible machine. It's pretty much good for web browsing and word processing and not much else (although I suppose it might just about manage Diablo II). So I was considering buying this Socket 478 Mobo to stick all of the above spare bits in.Obviously, it'd give me much better all-round performance, but at the cost of some extra power draw (since I doubt the savings from a more efficient mobo and lower voltage memory can compensate the 40W+ difference just from the CPU, let alone the discrete graphics!).
So, given that I have two other, more powerful, gaming PCs in the house anyway, would this just be a pointless waste of money? Or would this be a funky enough project to do "just for the sake of it"? And would I see enough of an improvement on my basic office and web tasks to make the additional power draw worth it? Would your opinion change if I mentioned that I do a fair bit of web design outside of work, and there's a reasonable chance I'd want to virtualise a Linux Server on this as a development / testing platform...?