I stumbled upon this post and thought hey I could do this. I picked up an 8300 from amazon for 180.00. It looks practically new, came with windows 10, 4gb ram and 500gb hdd. It worked fine.
I'm following the guide in this thread to get to Sierra and have windows on a separate drive. I got a Samsung SSD for OSX.
I updated the BIOS to v02.99 and installed snow leopard 10.6.3 via retail CD but was unable to get past that step because snow leopard doesn't see an Ethernet card. I got to 10.6.8 by downloading the update on my windows laptop then transferred via usb stick. I cant progress any further now without Ethernet access.
The BIOS sees the Ethernet card : Intel 82579LM connected
I tried using the Kext Wizard to install the appleintele1000e.kext , that didn't change anything.