Building a New Computer

[SomeNick]

Yeah true Papewaio. My first computer I built myself from pictures of magazines I found at op shops. Soon realised speakers weren't really necessary, when I discovered what the ports on a motherboard were. Haven't bought a soundcard to this day and probably never will. Good motherboard = good hub for machine & onboard sound, with good headphones.

Also about that hdd, I'd go for a few smaller drives. Then you have back ups in place and if you go for seagate hdd's get lots of fans ! I personally will never buy seagate again. Sucks when a large drive fails utterly, and your data isn't properly backed up elsewhere ( Hey , I was starting out!).
Plus it's more versatile.

I built a high end system at the time for 1500$ Ausd. But it involved a lot of ringing around for the best prices for components and research at the time. Well worth it though.

Also, I'd check out other popular game forums too in their technical/ support sections and search for info on new components. That's the first step I'd do before buying anything if building another pc.

Edit: Just read the post about the ram. I'd go for Kingston myself. Saw an excellent article about ram in a forum quite some time ago and if I can dig the link up I'll post it here. I have no problems with Kingston 512mb pc3200 DDR ram. Getting another one to go to 1 gb soon for RTW mainly :S and some other progs.

That article has lots of info on RAM sticks, it's a very overlooked aspect to pc performance and it's not just about the mb it's to do with manufacturing codes on them and stuff too. If I find that article I'll post the link.