[c0mfortably_numb]

I would recomend the AMD64's also I just built this system listed in my sig a few months ago. It's been great. I'm not sure how you are on upgradeitis but this Socket 939 is on its way out and AMD is going to be comeing out with another Socket soon supposidly, I couldn't be happier with the performance of this over my old AMD XP1700

I would recomend going with a minium of 1 gig of ram, and what ever you do I have seen to many mistakes were people skimp on the quality of the ram. Go name brand IE Crucial or Corsair. Also in what ever case you decide to build your new system plan on throwing the power supply away. Most power supplys are junk that they supply with new cases. With those 2 things alone you will have a much stabler system and less chance of random lock ups and BSOD (Microsofts famous blue screen of death)

Also for graphics, I would stick with Nvidia right now, especially if you plan on useing an LCD monitor with DVI output (which I am useing with my Geforce 6200) I have seen some complaints online with ATI image quality useing DVI...

 

[mr.karmalicious]

Ya... like everybody else has said, go for an AMD proc. They have a slower clockspeed, but they perform much better than Intels, even at lower clockspeeds.