Joefox

I have been building PCs from newegg for quite a while. I built one a few months back for around 3000. Remember not to sell yourself short on fans and cooling. You are after all running an AMD cpu, and judging by the looks of things you will also need to invest in a video card. Onboard VGA will not cover it. I assume you're going to be listening to a surround sound system also, hence the need for the 6.1 sound card. What sound card, an audigy2? In regards to the surround sound, it is not a must, but a digital encoder is usually a good thing to have, especially if you want to utilize the speakers for other devices such as a DVD player. I see you went all out on the processor. That may be a good plan, or that may not be. Generally the newest processors are always sickly overpriced, but then again so are all parts. I do think buying the dual layer nec burner is a good plan, seeing as how memorex and other companies will be coming out with dual layer media in the near future. You may want to invest in a CD burner that can read DVDs also. You never know when you may want to back something up by making a 1:1 copy, be sure it's your own bought and paid for stuff.

Anyway, if graphics is your main priority, you may want to think about waiting a while for the PCI express VGA mobos, they will surpass the AGP 8x architecture by a means you can't even imagine. Dual rendering VGA mobos, etc. So what am I saying? You could probably do yourself a favor, and wait a while, but if you're going with something now, then go heavily on ram, maybe look into if your mobo has a gigabyte lan, having a high speed broadband connection is always good, lots of fans (try finding a turbo fan, one that you can adjust to spin super fast in/out of case to cool your pc down in a hurry), even liquid cooling would be useful, also for increased airflow when it's all said and done I suggest tying your wires together in some way to increase the airflow. And buying a digital readout controller with a temp gauge may not be such a bad plan either, especially if you plan on overclocking.

As for VGA, getting a 256mb stick of memory on your card will ensure you are ready for the future. Although that may not be viable as when future games come out your actual complete system setup may not be up to par anyway, and you will eventually have to build another rig years down the road. Do what's within your budget, but 256mb would be better in my opinion. Make sure you run your operating system on the faster harddrive, I'm sure you knew that. Games will also run faster on your 10krpm hard drive, like if you're playing everquest, or any mmporg, the loading time between zones has to do mainly with your seek time. Check out the seek time on all hard drives. The smaller the seek time the faster you will be loading.

By the way, you don't need ECC registered memory. Go with some Corsair XMS highspeed memory. If your mobo can handle dual channel ddr ram then go with a paired pack of 512x2. Remember that DDR2 will be coming out soon, so again you may want to wait.