Advice on First Home build

One more thing. The PSU will come with hookups for floppy and DVD drive right? I just want to make sure I will miss NOTHING

Relax, of course the power supply will.

The video card will come with a cooler too.

I know what you said and I am going to suggest this anyway. Now as for your choice of the Opteron 146, I think it would be a wise investment to find a way to work one of these in your budget:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1681...

It's only about $100 more but it's Dual Core. Now it might not mean so much to you but by the time you go back to school in August you will be wishing you had bought the dual core because multi threaded games will be hitting the market pretty widely by then and they will really take advantage of these. Plus the stock cooler on the dual core chips is really nice (it's big, has an 80mm fan and four copper heat pipes), it will let you do some middle of the road overclocking. You won't need to buy another one unless you are doing high overclocking (over 400MHz+). The 146 comes with a really small cooler you will need to replace no matter what to overclock. You could spend $100 more now or about $300 more later to get a dual core. Plus buying a decent fan/heatsink for the 146 is going to be like $50, that's half the cost of an upgrade to a dual core. You could even get a 3800+ to save $30 bucks over the price of an Opteron, lots of people up here have OC'ed 3800+'s to some amazing levels. Even if you only do some mild overclocking at first until you can afford to add a bigger cooling system for the 3800+ it will still be worth it because you can always add that later.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1681...

I would also add some more fans. The case comes with 2x80mm fans but places for 3x80mm fans and 1x120mm fan. Pick up another 80mm fan and a 120mm fan. You can get both for like $10.

I would consider getting a duel core processor, or a duel CPU motherboard, and then you could get a second CPU when the duel thread games come out. I have an Asus k8n-dl, and it has ok overclocking options. Also the 246 is only 169 at NewEgg, it is OEM, which is good, if you are looking to overclock. The board will be a bit more expensive, but the 2xx CPUs are a little cheaper, and you will be able to just add a second CPU later, you won’t have an old single core lying around when you upgrade. Plus you could go to a duel core CPU if you wanted later on. My preference would be 246, with duel CPU board.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1681...

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