My dad is a structural engineer and has been trying to do more work from home on his shitty 2011 Dell XPS laptop. It's slow, outdated, and can't run the programs he needs. His coworker recently purchased a workstation by Dell and my dad asked him for the invoice. He was telling me all about this and was so excited to buy it and I asked - how much? The Dell tower was going to be $1908 and I asked him, honestly, if he'd prefer that I build him one for less. He asked if I could beat it, and I said yes - $1500 full build with two monitors, keyboard, mouse, and OS.

Well, I did it. I nearly had a foot-in-mouth moment because mimicking the Dell workstation while keeping budget was... challenging. He insisted that I needed Windows and Office pro "from a legit source." No fun. I was lucky to get Office Pro through work for $6 and through careful part picking, I was able to get pretty close to his original budget of $1500. I probably could have saved a little more if I went through more than Amazon, but I'm impatient and was traveling for work in 3 days so I wanted to get it done asap. Although I exceeded the budget, he and my mom are thrilled with the build and are also happy that they (in theory) saved $500.

Pics first:
https://imgur.com/a/oNqRI

The Dell build:
Xeon E5-1603 v3, 8Gb RAM, Quadro M2000, 1TB HDD, Windows 7

This build:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Some thoughts:

The case:
Pros:

Simple, lightweight, small, and cheap. I like the glossy front. The metal is thin, which made it easy to pop out sections for the GPU and CD drive. Access holes were well placed for drive mounting. I like the SSD mount on the bottom of the case.
Cons:

• The rubber feet are barely glued on and fall off easily.
  Although there are holes for screw-in feet, they are not used.
  
• The length of the USB and sound connectors for the front of the case left a lot to be desired. I had to reroute the cabling through the drive bays in order to plug in the sound connector. It was not long enough at its original position.
  
• It was challenging to remove the plastic cover front of the case to access all the cabling and to punch out the panels at the cd drive bays. The cabling wasn't initially long enough to reach the connections on the motherboard. Wtf?
  
• It's a mystery from where the 140mm fan pulls air in the front of the case. I added an 80mm fan to the side panel to add more airflow.
  
• The 80mm fan didn't have mounting locations on the side panel, so I improvised and only mounted it with 2 holes.
  
• You kinda have to suspend the PSU to mount it properly.
  
• 0 considerations for cable management; no loops, holes, strap locations, etc. Does not come with zip ties.
  

I would, however, recommend this case to a budget builder. There's a lot of room inside despite the non-modular psu.

The motherboard:
Pros:

• Wifi, USB3.0
  
• Small form factor
  
• Worked with 7th gen intel processor out of the box; I did not need to do a BIOS update
  

Cons:

• installing the wifi antennas is an absolute nightmare; I recommend doing this AFTER installing the CPU and BEFORE the GPU and RAM. FUCK THESE ANTENNAS. I only installed one because they kept getting disconnected. Of course, my dad goes "Oh I was gonna use ethernet anyway we are moving the router" so fuck me I guess.
  
• weird locations of certain connections made assembly more challenging than normal
  
• some of the I/O ports were not punched out
  

You'll need to connect wires and components small --> big if you want to assemble this properly. I started with the case connections, fans, and the SATA connections and it made the process much easier. The PCI-E is locked by a slider instead of a snap, which I thought was a little strange. A lot of the reviews online have this board arriving DOA. Mine was fine.

The SSD:

It's noticeably slower than my other SSD (some Sandisk I bought in 2015) but it was a great upgrade for my parents from their junky HDD. Boots to his desktop in about 10 seconds.

The monitors:
Colors look terrible out of the box. Colors did not match each other right out of the box. After some adjustment, they are fine. The only come with VGA cables. I had a couple extra HDMI laying around so it was fine.