you will get more bang for your buck going with AMD over pentium. better performance for less money, just not the absolute latest and greatest.
forget the duel video cards. they are still in their infancy and need a bit more development before they are ready as a vialble upgrade. for instance, the radeon briged set up was showing mixed results, better performing in some bench marks and not as good in other bench marks when compared to a single card with the same processor on it. you dont get twice the performance with a duel card set up, just twice the price.
that said, PCI-E (express) is the latest rage in video cards ATM. seems going back to a pci slot somehow increased performace over the agp slot by two fold. kind of like going back to bell bottoms when you run out of new ideas. anyway, you will need a motherboard that supports PCI-E to take advantage of it.
ASUS motherboard. cant go wrong. fairly inexpensive, and reliable.
SATA hard drives have come way down in price as they should have. you can pick up a raptor 10,000 rpm hard drive for under 100 bucks now. make sure your motherboard can also support SATA drives.
you will need the best ram your motherboard will support. crucil will list what you need for you based on your motherboard, its a good site for finding what ram you need, but not for the best price. try www.pricewatch.com for prices.
sound card. dont get one. huge waste of money. almost all built in sound cards on motherboards are as good quality as a soundblaster live card. infact, the last asus motherboard i used had a 5.1 soundblaster compatable built in sound card. means you have 5 seperate channels for speakers for surround sound and 1 channel dedicated to bass. built in. for no extra money.
a good site for figuring out what you need and for how much money is www.pricewatch.com . for instance, i picked up a 512 mb PCI-E radeon 1600 video card there for the same money it would have cost me to buy the 256 radeon 850 PCI-E card for in tiger direct. it was, however, not a retail box. IE, a plain white box with just the video card and drivers techs use to fix or build computers. no extras, like the free games and stuff that come with the retail box.
PERSONALLY, i would wait till march to built it. late feburary is usually when the next latest and greatest hit the market, so as to get the most bang for their buck on products they introduced through out the year during the christmas shopping season. in march, this years latest and greatest will be replaced with next years latest and greatest, and you can get the system you plan on building today for significantly less money in 3 months. march, every other year, is when i plan my upgrades.
