I am not good at modding andI like snakes so this case is perfect for me. I don't "need" a 500 watt PSU either. some reviews said the case is pretty good. I got the RAM because I don't know much about overclocking RAM really high so I got some RAM rated at a high speed. I might get some cheaper if I find some RAM that will get nice timings at a high speed. I am keeping the Zalman until I find something better. unless you think stock HSF will do a good job.

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I doubt there's anything better than the Zalman at the moment, but the question is, do you really need it? Probably not. And be aware that if you use anything other than the stock HSF w/thermal pad, you can kiss your AMD warranty goodbye. I suggest you save your money (& warranty) & use the stock HSF for starters. If you feel it's not up to the task, you can upgrade later, but if you somehow fry the CPU in the earlier going & you didn't use the stock unit, you'll be replacing the CPU with your own money. Also, is the difference between the 3200+ & 3500+ Venice really worth $75-80? And as I tried to explain about the 500W PSU, it's not a good one. I don't like the look of the case, but I can't fault you for that, we all have our own tastes...but I'd be willing to bet that PSU is gonna give you problems. Another thing to consider is the board you chose has the 24-pin ATX main power connector, so you need an ATX12V 2.0 PSU, the old standard ATX 1.0 PSU isn't gonna cut it. Check the case specs to see what PSU type is included. Then there's the RAM...I'm sorry, but to me, $185 for 1GB of RAM is just plain ridiculous. Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz 768MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro

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"use smaller drives, run raid." I at least have to caution against this. Pheonix is recommending what I would assume would be RAID0. This doubles your chances of data loss due to hard drive failure. If one of the two drives fails, you lose ALL data on the drives. If you do this, you should factor in an external hard drive and Windows XP Pro to do complete backups of your drive unless you have no important data, and you want to spend hours reinstalling and patch all your games, apps, etc. should one of the drives fail. RAID0 also does not significantly increase frames per second, in fact usually not at all. Your biggest gain would be reduced time starting games, or loading levels into memory. A good, fast SATA hard drive would do a good job of that anyway, or using an additional drive for app and game installations, and allowing paging to both drives could make up some of the difference without increasing chances of data loss. Personally, I have run RAID0, and I didn't see it making that much of a difference in a gaming rig. Therefore, I don't recommend it for gaming rigs. "Republicans in Congress are moving to ratify a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, thus ending the Iraq insurgency."

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