Macro - 9:09 am on Oct 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

>> If I were getting a dedicated professional video editing setup
I'm not talking dedicated, pro setup. I'm talking amateur home videos but with the right gear (Use a car to ferry the four children to school instead of using a motorcycle and making four trips).

>> I am trying to make sure I get some industrial strength components
That doesn't make sense. That would suggest you're willing to put a top notch hard disk in there but live with a cheap motherboard that develops an IDE controller problem that trashes your hard disk (just an example). Either it's tough, or it's not. One weak link and all that...

>> Are there guidelines anywhere for computing how large a power supply I need?
If you find a clone builder who can do that... treat him like gold. I've yet to meet one who can. (The good guys) usually bung in something far in excess of what you need and keep their fingers crossed. Sticky me full details of the exact components you need the calculation for and I'll do it for you if you want. You can't calculate PSU requirements accurately without knowing exactly what devices are drawing power, how many devices there are, how much of er, "power" they are drawing, on what lines (5V/12V) they are drawing it on etc. Even your PS2 keyboard draws power (a small, small fraction of 1 amp on the 12 Volt line). And those calculations are hardly ever done nowadays anyway. Besides, even if you have the ideal PSU requirements one manufacturer's 350 W PSU won't give you the same "power" as another manufacturer's 350 W PSU. Without going into details - don't trust the figure printed on the box.

I don't see any need to go for IDE when SATAs are available at pretty much the same price.

The P4P800? Hmm. That's the ideal "con" motherboard. PC builders love it because there are several versions some costing half the price of others. So you list a PC in an ad with a P4P800-E Deluxe but use the P4P800-MX in actual builds. In any event, those are 478 pin motherboards and the market has now moved over to LGA 775.

I don't know exactly what budget you're on but it looks like your best bets are to either wait till you can spend some more... or - I never thought I'd say this - buy a Dell, as suggested by a previous post. Their quality is as good as you are going to get in that FX5200/entry level 80 GB hard disk/budget motherboard market. That's core Dell territory and what Dell does best.

There are a lot of good sites on silencing computers. www.silentpc.se is great. Even www.nonoise.org has an article on cheap ways of silencing PCs. Try Google.

Oh, and there's nothing difficult to configure on any P4P800 board. My suggestion: dump that clone builder. Find someone who knows something about PCs. :)