Getting a new comp...
 

AMD64 3800+ 2.4Ghz 512K 400fsb box S939................................$439.00
ZALMAN CNPS7000B-CU CPU COOLER.........................................$49.00
7025-010 K8N Neo2 Platinum S939 nVidia nForce 3 Ultra chi............$175.00
Maxtor 300G DM10 SATA 16M 7200RPM.......................................$252.72
512M PC3200 DDR400 (4 of them)..............................................$55.00X 4
PIONEER DVDRW 16X INT. IDE DVR-109.......................................$79.00
3Com 56K v.90 PCI internal Fax/Data Winmodem #3090..................$19.00
Mitsumi 7 in One Card Reader/Floppy Int. USB2, CompactFlash, Mic...$29.00
P160 Anodized Aluminum Super Mid Tower....................................$155.00
ANTEC TRUE 430W ATX12V PS/2 SIZE 2 FANS LOW NOISE UL FCCB..$95.00
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Total.....................................................................................$1512.72

These are CANADIAN prices :)

Any hardcore hardware ppl know if i can get anything even slightly better without significantly increasing the price?

Am i making any bad decisions here?

My limitation is that i already have an ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 pro which means i HAVE to use an AGP mother board.

Are you building this system yourself...as in purchasing the parts and building it yourself.

nah, i'm just making a list of parts, choosing exactly what i want and having the store make it

edit

i've decided stores charge too much, i'm gonna order the parts online and have a friend help me build it

For the price of 1 300gig drive, you can pretty much get 2x 160gb - which does 2 things:

a little more storage

and more importantly, the ability to set up a RAID array. Faster access times.

But other than that, for a non PCI-E setup, not too shabby.

yeah i may get another 300gb in the future, for now i'm fine without RAID

I wishi could go PCI-E but i really don't want to spend the money on another video card, I :heart: my AIW 9800pro

Anyway, I updated my first post with exactly what i'm getting and the price... so if someone could look it over I'd appreciate it

Hmm it all looks good.
the only thing I can see is the ram, rather than go for 2 gig of generic ram i would go for 1 gig of good quality ram. 2 gig is overkill that will hardly ever get used in full.

and maybe go for a smaller drive at 10,000 rpm for the same price.

haha it's funny.. that's exactly what i did (before reading your post)

My main drive is a western digital 74gig raptor, i put the 300gb maxtor as the secondary

i also got 1 gig of OCZ ram instead of the 2 gig generic overkill