First Time Builder

i can't put my finger on you

<A HREF="http://www.lochel.com" target="_new"><b><font color=green>Go To My Site</A>

Haha..that did sorta scare me at first.

I might add drop the cordless stuff to save a few $$ and put a cdrom in it IF you are planning on making backups of games.. many backups won't work in the cdrw but will in the cdrom./. you might consider the turtle beach santa cruz sound card too much better than a SB live and reasonable cost

<font color=blue><b> Common Sense is anything but ... Common !</font color=blue></b>

Yeah, get DDR. Also, IBM has been very unreliable, so imo, get a Maxtor d740x, which costs $72 for 40Gb model.

My frog asked me for a straw...dunno what happened his ass all over the place

I looked at that Santa Cruz sound board, and I think i'll go with that. Same thing with the Maxtor HD. If so many of you guys have had problems, i'd rather avoid that in my first homemade. Also, any recommendations on a good motherboard (not too expensive)?

The only reason I was thinking about a cordless keyboard/mouse was that my desk is kinda small, so I thought I could just put the keyboard/mouse in a different spot while i'm not using it.

The CPU i was looking at was a T-Bird, do you think I should go with XP? 1800 XP?

This Saturday is the Peter Trapp Computer Show near where I live, so I am going to do gown there. I'll probabily look for a DVD drive and maybe a case. If I look for a case, what should I look for? I was hoping to get one with a power supply. 350watts is what I need? Is there anything else that I should look for while I am there? (Already planning on buying a floppy drive there too) Thanks for the help so far...sorry about all the questions in this post.

What do you guys tihnk of the ABIT KR7A-133 motherboard?

for the mobo i suggest the gigabyte GA-7DXR+ it has udma133 raid usb2.0 dual bios. its high performing and incredibly stable. and its about $80-$90

I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.

dont get athlon 1.4ghz, get something newer, even if its just the 1.4ghz athlon xp (hardly costs anymore)

p.s. advice for first time builder;
(1) earth yourself or static electricity will kill something and piss you off a lot.
(2)do not under any circumstances read the instructions, (apart from for motherboard), in my experience it only leads to massive confusion.
(3) dont overclock/use most agresive settings until its been up and running for a few days.
(4) if you have any problem of any kind just post it somewhere here and you will definately be helped out.

I need a 1.5 Ghz Athlon + 512mb ddr ram to write emails......honestly

Yea, I think I am going to go with the Athlon XP 1800 or maybe even 1900. I am going to the Peter Trapp copm show tomorrow, any ideas on stuff to look for that I could pick up there? I've never been to a show like that before, so I don't really know what to expect.

I was looking at these two motherboards:

Abit KR7A-133R
Abit KR7A- Raid

I don't really understand the differences. Any comments. Also, this is what i have changed my component list to:

Case - still looking
mobo - still looking
CPU - AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Cooling - ThermalTake Volcano 7
RAM - 2 Crucial 256 MB PC2100 DDR
Video - GeForce Ti4200 64MB DDR
Sound - Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
Hard Drive - Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 40GB
CD-RW - Lite-On 40x/12x/48x
DVD-ROM - Pioneer DVD-116 16x
Monitor - Samsung SyncMaster 955DF 19"
Keyboard/Mouse - Decided not to go with the cordless right now. I'll probabily just go with a keyboard i like and a decent mouse.

What do you guys think of that? Anything that sticks out as totally wrong?

Well the 133R board has an ATA133 RAID chip on board and the normal version an ATA100.
Now there isn't any noticeble difference between ATA100 or 133 so you can just take the cheapest one.

<b>P75 @ 90 Mhz</b>... because I need the speed.