OT: Building A New System

[Roanon]

A good case is not a case with lot of places for fans. More fans = more noise = not a good idea normally.
There also is a big difference in fan noise, and usually cheaper = more noise. Over here, you can get CPU fans from 10 to 80 € - and you hear the difference. Very much. Same for power supplies. Also check out the latest graphic cards not only for performance, but a few companies (ASUS has started it) are offering cards with more efficient, noise-reduced fans. Up to a few years ago, the graphic card fan usually was the loudest and crappiest, this is not a must any more.

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe has had a lot of failures lately - 2 out of 3 for me, 5 out of 12 I know, and I won't buy another ASUS board for some time. They have started ruining their good reputation some time ago, and now it's really bad. Everything within warranty, but still annoying. Right now, I recommend AMD and EPOX Boards. Stick to the VIA chipsets, though, nForce is still not good. With latest drivers, there are no big problems with VIA now.

RAM: Corsair or Kingston (don't know Crucial), expensive but very good. No no-names - too many failures, and memory errors can happen at odd times after some time of perfect service, giving you a hard time to find out what is really wrong with your system.

And remember: no Windows XP Home if you want to utilize more than 512 MB RAM.