Jim Burton, Glad to see you mention Tom's Hardware Guide. I did most of my research on building my computer there. As far as the noisy cooling fans go, your are absolutely right. I have 4 of them in my rig and can hear them from 3 rooms away. If I was going to recommend an Intel CPU, I would have to go with a PIII 1.0 or 1.2 ghz model. The PIII appears to have a significant performance advantage over the Celerons unless things have changed very recently. I would stay away from the P4 due to their high cost which is not justified by their performance. Tom did a nice article on his site about "Best Bang For The Buck CPUs" which I thought was very enlightening.