Help buying a new PC.

[sdtPikachu]

Workstation:

Athlon 2400 cooled by an Alpha PAL 8045
Abit KD7-RAID
512 MB DDR SDRAM/PC 2700
Adaptec 29160 SCSI card
Seagate Cheetah 18.4 GB 10,000 rpm HD
2 x 80 GB Seagate Barracuda IV's in software RAID 1
40 GB Barracuda in removable caddy
Geforce 4 Ti4200 128 MB
Audigy Platinum
Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM
Philips 48/24/24 CDRW
Dual booting Win2k and Redhat
All wrapped up in a Lian Li PC-65


File server:

1 GHz P3
384 MB SDRAM
30 GB Fujitsu hard drive
3ware 4 channel IDE RAID card
2 x 120 GB Western Digital Caviars (RAID 1)
Running Redhat


HTPC (half built):

Athlon 1800
256 MB DDR SDRAM
Gigabyte 7VKML mATX motherboard
Audigy
ATI AIW 9000
20 GB Seagate Barracuda
Will eventualy run Mandrake and Win2k once it's finished


I also use two other C's in the house as render nodes for making my XviD's of DVD's (my workstation does most of the work), cuts a render down to about three hours.

All of these were built by my fair hand. If I'd have bought them ready made, they'd have cost me about a third more again.

SB Live will do 5.1 surround, but it's partly done in software, so has more CPU overhead than the Audigy. But if you don't have decent speakers forget buying a soundcard and just use the onboard codec (assuming your mobo has one), you'll never be able to tell the difference.

As far as graphics goes, if you're serously into games, I'd go for one of the cheaper GF4 Ti chipsets (64 MB of VRAM will do you fine, byt the time games actually need 128 MB of VRAM the GF4 will be crap anyway), but then nVidia's drivers have always been streets ahead of ATI's. Yeah, the 9700 is the best at the moment blah blah blah, but it's never a good idea to buy the top of the line, as the price drops quickly soon after. For the price conscious gamer, the GF4's up to the Ti4200 and the Radeon 9000 series are a good bet, and will run Doom3 and Unreal 2 at respectable framerates.

P.S.

If you can be bothered to learn how to build your own computer, do so. You will never want to buy an off-the-shelf PC ever again.