Well after 5/6 years my current PC is starting to show it's age, in terms of speed and storage capacity. The time has come to replace the old with the new and thanks to my parents giving me a handout I have the funds to build my own box. This is the first time I've ever actually put together my own. With my current one I specified the major parts but never got my hands dirty. Now I will. Using the same budget as before Im going to hopefully build something that will again last up to 5 years.

I started by looking to ArsTechnica Buyer's Guide for inspiration. I drooled over the God Box but I knew I'd never be able to afford it. Looking at the Hot Rod didn't really inspire me as much as the God Box but it still did seem to be a good system. So for starters I've combined parts of the God Box and Hot Rod. here what I've come up with so far below:

Motherboard: Supermicro P4DCE+ Processor: Intel Xeon 2.8GHz Retail Box RAM: 1024MB PC800 ECC Rambus RDRAM Video: ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Sound: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Comms: 3Com 3C996B-T 10/100/1000 PCI Hard Drive: Western Digital WD800JB 80GB Special Edition DVD/CD-RW: Lite-On LTR-48246S & Pioneer DVD-116 16X Case: Antec Performance Plus 1080AMG Monitor: Samsung 900NF Speakers: Logitech Z-560 4.1 Mouse: Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro Floppy: Teac 1.44MB

Total Cost of Hardware : £1,641.86 GBP

This is £200 pounds below my budget limit so Im going to play about a bit. Granted I haven't put a lot of thought into the mobo or processor choice yet as this is only a starting point. I'm going to research a bit more and I'll post more as I change parts of the system. I will have to quickly research and decide between an AMD or Intel processor and the different flavours. Is HyperThreading really helping throughput or will a shorter pipe be better?

I'll get back to you!