OT: Building A New System

[Will]

I'm currently on a Soyo MB, with Athlon CPU. But they seem to have a rather nice P4 mobo as well {link}.

Memory, I've used Kingston and PNY in the past, and they've worked well for me, no failures. Get cooling sleeves though, they only cost something like $1.50, and I know DDR can get fairly hot (friend's personal experience with burned fingers, not my own).

For the DVD Drive, I have a Lite-On DVD burner, supports +, -, +/-, RAM DVD formats, and was at same speeds to the other DVD burners I was looking at (a Sony and some other brand). Only difference was the Lite-On was $190, and the other two were $240.

HDDs, I've only used Maxtor and Western Digital. I haven't had a hard drive failure. One of my friends had a Western Digital fail after something like 9 years (I think the computer was dropped...).