mincklerstraat - 9:11 am on Oct 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

Getting the better power supply now is probably worth it if you already see yourself doing video work in the future.

I went on a big investigation spree when I put together the specs for the system I'm running now and there were quite a few people, 'hardware guru' types included, who seemed happy with the WD drives - I've got a Maxtor 120MB SATA with 8MB cache and it does me well. SATA drives cost the same or just a little more than ATA drives, and are supposed to be better in mirroring combos (RAID).

The best place I've found on getting your computer to quiet down is [silentpcreview.com...] - look in the left menu under 'sections' instead of the articles on the front page, which are more 'the latest and coolest' sorts of news articles for the hardcore enthusiasts. I ended up getting myself an Antec Sonata case - nice 12cm fan in the back that will push enough air even when it's rotating slowly, rubber grommets, fairly quiet power supply that regulates fan speeds according to load - and a Zalman Al-Cu cooler for my processor - you can use the 'fanmate' rheostat thingie to make it go pretty slow, and this can also be connected to the case fan input so that also goes slower. If you're thinking about expanding to video later, get a rheobus for the front of your case so you can easily adjust the fanspeed when you fire up your video editing software.

I would have gotten the Antec SLK3700-BQE if it had been available - cheaper, bigger, better airflow, and not quite so 'designey'.

Intel boards are very, very stable, but expensive. My Asus P4P800 Deluxe uses the same chipset as the Intel you're looking at, but is probably a whole lot cheaper, and it also does the fancy fast-memory stuff that the next-line-up Intel chipsets do. I chose it because there's just a passive heatsink on the northbridge, no fan on the mother board, and it got great reviews for speed and stability. It's been nice and stable. It's got built-in support for RAID (the hd mirroring thing) if you wanna go that route.

I'm not an expert on video stuff but I'd get a board that doesn't do integrated video, since 'offshoring' your video can result in better performance. In your shoes I'd probably go for a cheaper video card and then think about upgrading the video card at the moment I'm considering the video stuff. Video cards have a faster development cycle, so a video card you buy today will seem like pretty old stuff to a videocard junkie in about 8 months time. You can get dual head cards (for two monitors) for pretty cheap now, I've got a Sapphire Radeon somethingruther which I chose since it's also passively cooled (no noisy fan).