What I personally did to keep my costs down, and my machine viable for gaming: Think modular, what you can't afford now, get support for.
For this reason alone, reuse what you can untill you can afford it all. I started with a CeleronA 466, 384 MB of PC100 RAM, an Nvidia TNT2 Ultra, and a Diamond Monster Sound MX300. Pretty 1997 gaming rig circa 1997, bad for 2002. I began looking around for a cost effective solution to my problem.
My answer was a Nvidia Nforce/Athlon XP solution, one Nforce2 and Barton core later I was up and running. The onboard NForce2 Audio, GeForce4 MX420, Ethernet, 6 USB 2.0, Firewire, PATA133, and other nice features got me up and running with just the mobo, processor and ram.
If you need to get the basics upgraded, make sure you get Nforce board with an AGP slot or PCIExpress (highly recommend that you do PCI-X).
But you need to know about brands and reliability, so here's the stuff that gets the Green Machine's list of pickle approved parts:
Mobo: Asus or MSI are the only names I trust in the bis, and further, there are some chipsets which you must avoid. Asus is preferred, MSI is a bit cheaper and overclock happy. MSI tends to throw all the bells and whistles in.
Chipset: AMD or Nvidia only (Nforce is green endorsed to the max), VIA has a history of bad I/O drivers and evilness with Win XP, SiS should be avoided like an envelope with bad grammar and white powdery residue.
RAM: Since you're going Nforce like the Green Devil suggested, you
must have premium branded RAM, even their cheaper counterparts from the same company.
The List:
- Kingston: The Jade Behemoth swears by the king, it is the only ram to have never let me down from the days of the 386.
- PNY: Also reliable by experience, but Kingston is preferred.
- Corsair: Great reputation for reliability and performance, but a little costly.
- Mushkin: Comes greatly recommended by my peers.
- OCZ: Comes greatly recommended by one of my favorite tech magazines.
Hard Drives: HDs are a simple matter, make sure you get SATA on your mobo, then get a SATA drive or a ATA drive with the following:
- 7200 Platter speed or greater
- 8MB Cache
- 133 minimum for ATA, 166 for SATA
- Avoid RAID arrays, they are a waste of time unless you plan on running a file server.
- Only get your drive from the following companies: Western Digital, Maxtor or Seagate. Hitachi is also a good buy, but is known primarily for storage space.
Cooling solutions: There are a few thing to concider here. Arctic Silver thermal paste, and Thermaltake active heatsinks. Except no substitues. Be aware of how much air you pump in and out of your case, you should have roughly equal flow between all of your fans, no vacuums, and no high pressure. Make as many blow in, as you have blowing out . . . don't forget to include your PSU fan, which is an exaust fan. A good PSU will last longer and run cooler, something to concider for the generic case.
For CD-ROMS, if you consider anything but Lite-ON as your CD-RW/CD-R/CD-ROM you must die, unless you like Plextor, in which case I will spare your life.
