Dell's got their new Inspiron desktop fleet that has a slim-fit tower, Jake, that you could get a decent sized HDD, 2 gigs of RAM, decent grafix card and a nice HD monitor for not too much..let me get a link for you.
http://www.dell.com/content/products...=19&l=en&s=dhs
Dunno if actual real-world space would be an issue here-the slim fits take up considerably less counter space then a conventional tower.