Heya,

I've never built my own computer and figure it's a good time to learn. I'm working with a budget of about $900 and am looking for the most bang for my buck. It would be nice if it could run games decently, as well.

Here's what I'm looking at for now:

Motherboard - Abit IP35 LGA 775 P35 ATX Intel
CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo Wolfdale 3.0 GHz E8400
Case - Aperia X-Jupiter-Jr G-Type X-JPJGT
Hard Drive -Seagate 250 GB 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache
DVD Drive - Lite-on 20x DVDr 8x DVD-RW 2 mb cache
Video Card - MSI GeForce 8800 GTS 640 Mb

Memory - Suggestions?
Power Supply - Suggestions?

What do you think? Is this a decent system for video editing and able to handle modern games?

throw away the 8800 640 and get an 8800 gts 512, and get any 2gb 6400 memory,(except the very cheap own brand stuff) psu, i would stick in a corsair hx520 or hx620 depending if you wana upgrade.

i know you were going cheap but if you are going to do digital processing the Q6600 would be better the E8400 is a gamer's chip (and cheap man's chip). that said either is fine.

The most important parts of a digital processing rig after the CPU is the memory subsystem and file system. Go with 4GB of ram because capacity > speed when it comes down to it. Also go with TWO identical harddrives and run them in a RAID 0 configuration so increased disk speed. The last thing you want to happen is for the memory to be be full and have your disk drives start thrashing to keep up with the demand. As for what brand you get, thats up to you. I like Corsair and A-Data. Also look at a PC Power&Cooling or Seasonic brand PSU if the budget permits.

PS. The E8400 is a good choice simply because it has SSE4 which will be very useful to you. The Q6600 is the way to go if you primarily use multi-threaded software so take a closer look at the software you want to use and look for SSE4 or Multi-threaded support and go from there.