Hi all, As I falue the help and opinions in this forum and run ME too, I would welcome a little input here if possible. There does not seem to be a 'dedicated' forum on here for my Q? I am going to buld my own computer within the next few months and after doing a LOT of homework searching different sites for info, I think I've come up with what may be a sweet machine (within my budget constraints), I have 'decided?' to opt for the following :- Epox 8KHA+ mobo AMD 1.4 or 1.6 Thunderbird @266 fsb 256 DDR ram 40 Gig HDD @ 7200 Other current devices will suit for now, but this is the main feature so to speak, so, for those of you that have no doubt a great deal more experience than I do, I would appreciate any comments about this set up, many thanks in advance. Steve

mobo is a little weak and I would rather have an onboard RAID system with (2) 20's stripped to 40 than one 40...take a look at the abit mobo's.

steve, sounds pretty good. couldn't tell you much about that motherboard, except that it's pricey, and i think it only has capacity for up to 1.5 GhZ. though, i run my amd at 1.3, and the board is built for a 1.2. if you're on a budget, you may want to spend more money on a good video and sound card, more memory, speakers, something like that, rather than an expensive motherboard. you can get a pretty darn good board for under $200. as far as the 40GB harddrive is concerned, you may want to consider bumping it to 60GB's. i comparison priced some harddrives, and it looks like the 60gb @ 7200rpm's is a better deal than say a 40 or 80. the price differences i found were about a twenty dollar difference between a 40gb and a 60gb. many 20gb go for almost as much as a 40. and, going from a 60 to an 80 is about a $50 difference. so, a 60 gigabyte disk could be more price effective for you. i recently bought one for $107 @ ,compuplus.com. remember to spend your dough on the good stuff and skimp on the other stuff like the case, keyboard, mouse, and other minor affects. do get a good cooling fan for your cpu, though. if you intend to buy your parts on line try these price comparison sites: pricewatch.com pricescan.com mysimon.com keep us updated. happy building!

steve, I just built a machine similar to what you are talking about. I went with the ABIT KR7A-RAID mobo, an AMD 1600xp processor, 256mb DDR RAM, 40 Gig 7200 ATA 100 HD, and a 56x cdrom. It all came to just under $500 w/s&h. The ABIT is a beautiful board with soft menu bios ( no opening the case to set jumpers ) just go into the bios and adjust it. It is also fully upgradable to the latest processor out today and maybe later. As far as RAM go to Mushkin.com. They have very good memory and the product support is great. I went with 264 but should have went with 512. Good luck!

I recomen using Asus mobo simply coz its stability is riliable and has gain many award around the world ... Related web [url]http://www.pcsforeveryone.com/buildit.html[/url] [url]http://www.pcworld.com/features/article/0,aid,55674,00.asp[/url] [url]http://www4.tomshardware.com/howto/02q1/020111/[/url]