> - Abit KV8 Pro

Using it, love it, K8T800 Pro chipset on a nice board. Very customizable, very stable, PCI/AGP lock rocks. Not for the VIA haters, but performance between latest VIA (K8T800 Pro) and NVidia (NForce 250 GB) is margin-of-error difference as far as I can tell and the boards are rock-steady. Best to stay away from older K8T800 and NForce 150 chipset based boards, I think.

> I'm assuming 512/1GB of PC3200 will be fine? I've been looking at a brand called
> GeIL which is cheaper than the kingstons etc.

I'm running 2 x 512MB Corsair Value Select PC3200 CAS2.5 at the moment. Good stable ram, not very overclockable, but I got some good timings out of it incl. 1T command.

> I've already got the CPU added to the shopping cart (AMD Athlon 64 3000). For
> gfx I'm going to stick in my FX5200 128MB for the time being. I'll upgrade that
> later when I get a better job :)

Hey, cool, same proc I've got!

I picked up a Radeon 9800 Pro when I built my sys, but I think the GeForce 6600GT is actually getting close to available now, and it's going to be in the same price range.
Something to consider, perhaps :)

Edit - something else maybe to consider is that very soon some cheap Socket 939 Athlon 64 3000+ and 3200+ are going to be available, and S939 certainly has a better future than S754, even if there's not that big of a performance delta.

-nZero