I'm moving out my parents place and into a house with my girlfriend. Mum and dad want to keep the 3 year old Dell that we went 50:50 on so they're paying me off and I'll build my own. Trouble is I've been out the game for so long I no longer know whats good. I got lazy last time and just let Dell do it.

I'll be ripping out my Hauppauge PVR-250 to use in the new PC as well as the Sony internal DVD burner. I'll also want room for 2 hard drives.

So I need advice on my motherboard, cpu, ram, AGP graphics card, sound card etc. Oh... and a cute sexy case is a must - and it must hold all the stuff!

I'd like USB2 sockets and lots of em. I'd like built-in Wifi and Bluetooth but this is not so important. Firewire would also be good.

So if you you were me what would you want? I want this to be a great gaming PC as well as one that will do all my media bits and pieces like video editing/DVD burning too. No, it can't be a Mac They scare me and all my software is for PC, sorry! Maybe next time

Help me!

I'd start with a Shuttle case and go from there. Every base Shuttle will fit all of the above, with the P series chassis offering space for 4 total hard drives.

As far a s a great gaming card, it all depends on how much you want to spend for one. $200 range, I'm still sold on the peformance you get from an NVidia 6600 GT. $300-$400, start looking at the ATI X800 lineup. More then that, you might find an X850 XT PE (joke around the net is the PE stands for Phantom Edition, but it should be easier to find now that the card has been out for a few months).

CPU wise, I'd advise an Athlon 64 socket 939 of some speed. Again all depends on your price range. Dual core at a reasonable price still seems to be many months, if not a year off for the PC world.

Tom, I appologize, I was going to say that there wasn't a P series available for AMD, but they just recently put one out! Coolness. But I'm still not sold on Shuttle. You can't upgrade it as much as I'd like, and there isn't a lot of room for hard drives.

Since you gave no mention of budget, I'll just tell you what I would be looking at if I were building now (which isn't as expensive as you can get, but it's more than 50% of a Dell).

Lian-Li case
ASUS motherboard
AMD 3500+
Western Digital Raptor for a fast OS drive
ATI video card (I just like ATI)
BRAND NAME memory (Crucial or Corsair or something)

I'm sure there's parts I'm forgetting. I'm not sure what to do for wireless internet, for example. I will say that the Shuttle has a nifty antenna package. Someone else is going to have to put up a bluetooth solution.

Personally, the next time I upgrade I'll only be getting the motherboard and CPU since I've already got the rest. But I really recommend that case. It's gotten great reviews from what I've seen, and IMO has a really innovative layout.

Oh, and here's the least expensive 24" widescreen LCD monitor. It's impressive, with DVI/VGA/component/S-Video/composite inputs in addition to two USB ports and a 6-in-1 card reader. All for $1200, nearly $400 less than most compettition.

I am partial to shuttles: http://us.shuttle.com

I love em. Got one at home and the office.

Don't forget the cold cathodes, led fans and 5.25 bay mounted cigarette lighter!

Seriously, another vote for the shuttle, I've one in the office and a discless unit sat under the TV, very quiet.

Serverworks' Opteron chipset is starting to leak out into the real world. This is possibly not so relevant for great gaming PCs, but for great workstation PCs it's worth waiting for.

Peter

Ok for cuteness I like the Shuttle cases but theres too many to choose from. I'd like a form where I can tick boxes to say what I want to put in there and it tells me the right case. Does that exist? And is it possible to buy just the case and put my own board in there?

And AMD processors... how does their speed compare to the Intels? How does this compare?

Thanks

I linked to that processor because it seems to be the sweet spot right now. You can go faster on AMD but you'll spend three times as much.

Frankly, there aren't a lot of choices in Shuttles. Not if you check off some big items in your mind. First choose a processor. If you're going AMD, go with either the SN95G5 or the previously mentioned SN25P. The first is smaller but the second gives you more expansion options (except it doesn't have a PCI slot). The SN25P also has 6 USB ports, which you said was important to you.

actually you can do SLI with shuttle cases starting with their latest model.
Pci_express graphics card slot and a pci+express x1 slot.


It can hold quite a few drives, but I am moving to external storage. a hotswappable SATA drive enclosure only costs about $100. and it can hold 5 drives. thats a 1TB plus storage in a neat box.

I'm pretty sure I've seen a motherboard which had a 16x slot and a 8x slot with one end just open. Looks a bit suspicious having the card edge just dangling in space but it apparently worked.

All the cards which are capable of doing SLI basically expect 8 channels each instead of 16 so you wouldn't be able to make it work even if you did hacksaw off the end of a slot.