Well Foocoding...
Hard Drives -
IBM- Heard terrible things about the deskstar series. Probably going to stay away from them <--- Good call. It's been covered a bit in these forums, so I wont go into it, but several models have had atrocious failure rates...
WD- Heard good things, I have a WD right now and has never caused problems. Doesnt support ata133? <--- nope, at present only maxtor support ATA133.
WD have come a very long way since the old 'caviar' days, but still from past experience I have trouble reccommending them. In saying that, their 100&120gb drives with the 8mb cache are... for want of a better phrase, hot sh!t
Maxtor- Another good brand? Not sure <--- again, they've come a long way. Im not too sure what effect the quantum buyout had on them, but I haven't heard nor experienced many bad things recently. Whereas 'back in the day' they were the bane of my systems...
Seagate- No Idea <--- Seagate are arguably the best HDD manufacturer out there. Aside from low failure rates, on the odd chance that one DOES fail their RMA procedure is excellent, and efficient. Their Barracuda ATA series drives are incredibly quiet, and very, very tough.
I took my coat off one morning and rolled it up - the 20gb drive that I bring to work almost every day went flying out of my coat pocket and bounced along on the pavement.
Naturally I was somewhat peeved by this - but the drive never missed a beat and works to this day...
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Video Card -
NVIDIA- Great, but need better 2d so no.. <--- as far as I knew the 2d quality issue was to do with a pair of banks of resistors and capacitors, placed just before the VGA output... which means that buying a decent card like a Leadtek will probably overcome this, and if you're interested in hardware mods - so will shorting out the caps.
ATI- Good all around? Probably going with them for 2d quality and DVD. Will a 8500le or even 7500 give me good 2d and DVD performance? <---- DVD performance being much of a muchness - I'd hope any card available for purchase right now would be able to handle DVD playback more than adequately...
ATI I have to say I haven't had many dealings with - I better leave that for someone who owns one. My only advice on this point, is look at some reviews. MULTIPLE reviews
Matrox- Good 2d but crap 3d? How is stability? <--- if 2d performance is your priority, then matrox may have just gained another customer
Matrox are good at what they do - they would have vanished by now otherwise - and the parhelia is a pretty good product considering it's the company's first venture into gaming GPUs (well not 100% gaming but u get the idea).
But if you want something with more grunt than a GF3 Ti500 for 3d apps - then you dont really want a parhelia.
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Motherboard-
Soyo- Heard lots of good in terms of stability. Probably going with the kt333 dragon ultra. Might wait for kt400
No idea about stability with the others-- MSI, epox, etc etc... <---- I must say that this is really the part you MUST put the most thought into.
It doesn't matter what anyone says, if your mainboard isn't up to scratch, your system never will be.
Soyo i've heard mixed results, but personally I haven't heard enough either way about them to bother doing any research.
Aopen - I'd reccommend, solely because they have a habit of releasing their products a few months after all their competitors - so that they can remove any issues the public experiences with the competing products...
MSI - previously I've been wary, but if you check out my system rig - Im running a 645 Ultra, and I can tell you i'm very impressed.
First MSI-based system i've built - and so far I haven't encountered an issue attributable to the mainboard. (except AC97 audio, but thats a long story, and in no way unique to MSI or the SiS 645 chipset)
Asus - great boards, shocking service. Personally I haven't seen much from them in the last 12 months, but several of my collegues swear by them. The last Asus board I saw was running a Duron 1.2g - never faulted in stress tests, but I only had my hands on it for about a week. If you care a lot - I can probably dig up what model it was.
Abit - I have yet to see an Abit board, actually... seem to be a LOT more common in the US than they are here in aussieland.
Intel - Stability Plus but very limited in 'tweaking' options generally. For a system you want to run @ stock speeds and stability is a premium, go intel.
Unless, of course, you're planning to build an AMD system - it probably wouldn't be a very sound choice then would it
Epox/ECS - put it away. I think it might have been Xbit that showed one of ECS' P4 boards actually factory overclock the FSB to keep their boards competitive. That's pretty poor, and a good indication of bad componentry.
FIC - same story as Abit. I can go by what i've heard - but you just dont see them over here.
PC-Chips/PC100/whatever the h3ll they call themselves now - i'm still convinced that their CEO is satan himself.
There was a thread on this topic already, and I maintain my opinion that they are second-rate, cheaply manufactured, poor quality, buggy boards. I dont care if they only cost 10c for an all-in-one solution; Things like faulty I/O ports on a whole SERIES of mainboards just can't be overlooked. Even if they did provide a fix.
Try finding any info on the PC100 M747. it's an AT/ATX slot1 board, one of their most popular... yet try getting them to admit they ever made it...
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Ram-
Crucial- Heard nothing but good about them-- But too expensive? Is it worth the price?
Corsair- Same as above <----- Corsair I dont know about, but Crucial, Micron, and Kingston get my vote.
You CAN get good-quality generic ram (samsung, hynix), but it's much more luck-of-the-draw when it comes to overclocking.
For stock speeds, generic is usually fine, but avoid 'Legend' if it's available where you are.
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I hope that at least gives you a bit of insight...
Good Luck!
Ph0.