I bought a Dell Precision 390 on eBay for about €300.

It had no monitor I connected my main monitor to it temporarily when installing everything, then remote desktoped to it after that.

I put 8GB of RAM in it. I bought that on www.memoryc.com (about another €120). Putting RAM in a machine is easy. Just get the right type, see how many slots are in the server, then put it in and reboot. Note if like me you had XP 32bit to start with, you'll not see the 8GB of RAM until you go to 64bit, which we'll do in two steps.

I then put it on my network here at home. To do that, I just stuck the network cable in the back. Make sure you have internet access, you will need it for updates and prereqs.

Installed Win2008 64bit. To do that, I downloaded the ISO, burned on to a DVD, then put the DVD in the new server, restarted and pressed F8 to boot from DVD. I then installed any updates.

Then I did the SharePoint 2010 basic install, it installed the prereqs for me too.

All was done in an hour or two, very quick and easy, much simpler than MOSS 2007 was.

So even if you don't have the beta yet, get your server ready!