Well I'm making a new computer and with help from Jon'C and my brother I have picked these out. Not the greatest ever I'm sure but thought I would post and see if anyone had any input. I trust Jon'C and my bro so I think this is pretty much it but with so much money being spent I thought I would hear some other opinions. I'm also posting to make my sure my hardware retarded brain didn't mismatch anything hah.

Motherboard: A ABIT AX8 Socket 939 VIA K8T890 ATX AMD Motherboard

Processor: A AMD Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego 1GHz HT 1MB L2 Cache Socket 939

Video Card: A eVGA 256-P2-N527-AX Geforce 7800GTX 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 VIVO PCI Express x16

RAM: CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200)

HD: A Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3300622A 300GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100

Sound card: A Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Interface

DVD/CD Burner A HP Black IDE LightScribe DVD Burner

Case: A Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450Watt

*edit changed HD because of motherboard specs.

whats the total?

I used to have an Abit KT7A-RAID mobo, and I swore that I would never get another Abit board again. Very unstable.

After monitor and software...just under $2000

Except for the VIA chipset on the motherboard, it looks fantastic to me.

Jon'C recommended the VIA for a reason that has left me (convo is saved on my work computer). You have another recommendation?

Buy a Mac.

Yeah, get Nvidia. Even if you have to ditch the X-Fi for an Audigy (since they're really not that much better IMO).

I prefer VIA over Nvidia for their better *nix support. I'm not a bit fan of Abit anymore though, had two boards die on me.

NVIDIA chipsets are unstable and bug-riddled. The vendor-provided BIOSes contain hacks - actual honest-to-god hacks - to get around the many and varied bugs in the chipset hardware. NVIDIA recently bought ULi to replace their southbridge which has never worked properly ever. How sad is that? (Note: Current NVIDIA motherboards still use the buggy southbridge.)
NVIDIA also ignores bug reports provided by hardware vendors. They don't care that their chipset is a buggy piece of crap, as long as every gullible gamer is buying them up.

And that's the only reason nForce chipsets are popular: customers read one micro-benchmark on a site that gets kickbacks from NVIDIA and then insist upon having nForce. It's disgusting. VIA isn't perfect but their chipset is way more stable and it has a perfectly reasonable feature set.

Toward that end, I'd still recommend the ASUS A8V and a SATA HDD. Not sure why you swapped those out, but I've never had a problem with ASUS and SATA is the future.

What about ATi's x200?

There are still issues with the USB support on the x200 chipset, they've been fixed on the x3200 (which from the recent batch of reviews is a kickass chipset btw) but the x3200 is outta the price range by the looks of it.

I've read on a few Hardware sites that the extra your paying for the fancy fan/heatsink on the eVGA might not be worth it, I'd probably stick with the 7800GTX (unless you want to up it to a X1800XT) but consider one of the other slightly cheaper models, might save you $20-$30 if your bothered. (MSI card or the eVGA without the fancy headsink) The extra 20mhz you get on the core is normally easy to achieve with any card.

Otherwise everything else looks pretty good, I've heard there are issues with both SIS and Nvidia chipsets, as to which is worse, all depends on peoples experience, I've had none with socket 939 so I won't comment.

I'm still curious as to why some people think they're "bug-filled" crap. Nvidia hasn't had serious issues since Nforce2.

Oh, and Nvidia has /excellent/ drivers for linux. I just reinstalled Gentoo on my system, and I had every driver for my motherboard installed with the defaults, no fancy issues or anything. (Yes, even both ethernet cards, and the SATA drivers)

But then you have to keep in mind, I've never owned a VIA chipset mobo that has worked correctly. Ever.

Computers are lame.

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[QUOTE=Cool Matty]I'm still curious as to why some people think they're "bug-filled" crap. Nvidia hasn't had serious issues since Nforce2. [/QUOTE]

Did you mean nForce3? Because nForce2 for Socket A motherboards is rock solid. I remember when the first 64 bit processors came out for Socket 754, there were a lot of reported issues with nForce3. I don't remember the specifics, but I'm pretty sure nForce2 never had any significant issues.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]I'm still curious as to why some people think they're "bug-filled" crap. Nvidia hasn't had serious issues since Nforce2.[/QUOTE]Hahahahaha, yeah you go on believing that.

Fact is: you don't notice any show-stopping bugs because BIOS programmers are spending tens of thousands of hours slaving over a hot debugger trying to cover them up.

Idiots read the fake benchmarks on HardOCP and Tom's Hardware, then go to a computer store and say "Duhh Joe, me want NFORCE AND RAID AND FX70". What are the hardware vendors supposed to do? People demand crap, so they're given crap. The demand for these horrible chips is so profound that it's driven AMD out of the chipset market - which is sad, because unlike NVIDIA they actually know how to properly implement HyperTransport and PCI Express and a southbridge that doesn't have horrible USB performance issues.

And you know what? I'm going to trust the BIOS programmer who I talked to about NFORCE over your bad advice. I suggest that anybody who wants a stable computer do the same.

Right. And it's not possible that you didn't screw up the install or anything.
The only issue I know of with K8T800 is poor IDE performance, which doesn't matter because IDE is obsolete.

If you don't like VIA, you can always go for one of the newer ULi motherboards. NVIDIA bought them, but currently-shipping ULi chipsets aren't fouled with their incompetence. You can also get an ATi motherboard as long as you make sure it has a ULi southbridge on it (most of them do).

Yeah, nForce2 was pretty solid. nForce3 and 4 both have serious issues, most of which stem from their poor implementation of HyperTransport. To be fair here - it's a very new way of doing things. It took a long time for vendors to figure it out. VIA has the best handle on it. Apparently AMD is also very accomodating when it comes to debugging, but NVIDIA ignores bug reports regarding their chipsets.

It really is just a moneymaking scam.

Only motherboard I found with both SATA II and PCI_Express x16 was this one here ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 Socket 939 ULi M1695 ATX AMD Motherboard . Before I found that I figured I would drop the SATA II HDD for a motherboard that had PCI-E. I could be off though cause I really am totally out of the hardware loop and what works with what

You don't need SATA II.

I changed the HDD to a 250 gig WD SATA drive. I read reviews and the Seagate gave many people problems when using it on a stepped down Serial ATA150 only motherboard instead of the SATA 300 its capable of. Saved a little bit of money too.

As I said I couldn't find a good board with both SATA II and PCI-E x16 so if anyone finds one let me know.

Also added a DVD/CD-ROM.

HD: Western Digital Caviar RE WD2500YD 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150

DVD/CD-ROM ASUS Black 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM ATAPI DVD-ROM (Looked for a SATA in this and the DVD burner. Found a couple but a bit costly. Might reconsider here if I get a wild hair.)

Edit: Well I take that back, I can of course find those boards but not in the VIA. I might just go with an otherI was looking at this board : ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD but if the nvidia isn't the right way to go (and I have read that and been told that by multiple sources) I'm not sure if its worth changing.