- Case - Cooler Master N280 cheapie - crude but effective. This case wasn't expensive, it fits on the side shelf of an old Ikea desk and it has lots of space behind the motherboard for my not so expert cable management. It has all the elegance of a DeWalt hammer drill but it keeps on truckin'.
- Fans- I have a couple of 120 mm intake and exhaust fans and I just used the stock CPU cooler. No problems ever.
- Motherboard - Gigabyte micro ATX. I splurged on the high-end AMD A85X chipset which was probably overkill. However, I got USB 3 and SATA 3 support - tons of it.
- Memory - 16GB of DDR3 1600. I never have worried about swap files.
- CPU - A8 quad-core AMD Trinity. This was a much-maligned processor chip but I still find it plenty fast and powerful if a bit power hungry.
- Video - started out as an APU but Linux support problems led me to a discrete card. I have an R7 360 which is hopelessly obsolete now - but still works fast for most tasks I put it to.
- Storage - started out with a Toshiba 1 TB HDD and later on added a 128 GB Toshiba SSD. All the speed and capacity I'd ever need.
- Wifi - PCI based Atheros chipset TP-Link. Works very well some distance away from the router.
- Power Supply - Corsair 430W - it's smooth and reliable.
- DVD-RW - Yes I have one. No I don't need one.
Regrets - I had some teething problems with AMD and probably if I had to do it again would go with Intel and Nvidia. However as the system ages, it works better and better with AMD FOSS drivers.
Right now this system is working great with Linux Mint 19 and honestly, I see no need to replace it as long as it continues to function well.