Some decent advice above, though keep in mind that if a person ever has some problem with some component, they tend to dwell on that (human nature) and generalize it. Opinions are also laced with personal bias and preference, so keep that in mind too. Having said that (you can apply the above to my comments as well ;)... I mostly agree with EricSD - if you're going the pre-built route, Dell might be the best choice of those mentioned. But before you take that plunge, you should also take a look at www.alienware.com and look at their Area-51 systems. These folks (and www.falcon-nw.com) built their reps on building kick-ass gaming systems and use quality components (even if you don't do games, the same parts are needed for high-performance rendering systems). Personally, I've been building my systems for the past 10 years or so and my current preferences are for: - a 2.6ghz or greater P4 (3.2 is currently the high end, so you pay a premium for those) - 1gig of memory - Gigabyte motherboards (I've been a big ABIT fan for a while now, but Gigabyte looks to have the most bang for the buck in the latest offerings) - 800mhz FSB - 420watt or better power supply - nVidia 5600 FX (or the 5900 FX, but again you pay a premium) - WinXP (either home or Pro will do) - I'd personally avoid Win2K, as it's an obsolete OS. If you want the more current/robust OS, go with XP Pro, you'll have fewer compatibility problems going forward. ...ATI and nVidia have been going head-to-head for the past few years and the latest cards from each are roughly on par with each other (ATI seems to have more or less caught up). This mostly boils down to personal preference and I've been a happy nVidia customer for years now. In general, you should avoid any 'integrated video'. Integrated gigabit ethernet is a good thing with the latest chipsets (kinda depending on the implementation) and integrated sound may be sufficient. Other things to look for on the motherboard (for future-proofing) are max FSB speed, serial ATA (SATA) and AGP Pro 8x. A good review/article on some of the latest P4 motherboards can be found here: http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030707/index.html ...if you read all the way through that, you should pick up a lot of useful information (some people claim Tom is biased one way or the other, but that article is mostly factual, not much subjective). He's also got articles on video cards, AMD chipsets/motherboards, etc. Good luck, - Keith

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