Setting up a Virtual Lab for SharePoint 2010

So - having always run virtual machines on my lap-top with the previous version of SharePoint, its 4gb of RAM just isn't enough anymore. I figured I may as well take advantage of rock-bottom hardware prices and set up a virtual lab.

For home use, consumer grade hardware is perfectly capable of hosting virtual machines reliably, so I logged on to Umart to see what was on offer.
After a while, I settled on an AMD based system, as the prices seemed lower for what I wanted to do (raw computing power per dollar was higher). I settled on the following hardware;
AMD Phenom II x6 1055t
Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 motherboard
Kingmax 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 RAM kit x 2
Western Digital 1TB SATA3 Harddrive x 2

I stuck it all in an Antec NSK6582b case, with an Earthwatts 430w powersupply.

I plan at a later stage on installing a couple of extra hard drives and getting a RAID array going for performance, which the motherboard will support, but that is a battle for another day.

All in all, I've ended up with a 6-core, 16GB RAM machine for under $800. Since the whole thing is for dev and testing, my TechNet subscription will cover any licensing, so I went ahead and installed Windows Server 2008R2 and configured the Hyper-v role.
Now to create a virtual machine template using sysprep... let the games begin!