I’m gonna splurge for a gaming pc from www.ibuypower.com . Problem is, I know very little about computers. Im going to get the amd kt333 2100 processor and the geforce 4 4600. I have no idea how to choose a motherboard or most anything else. If you go to ibuypower and fill in the blanks and post the stats here I’ll give you a dollar and be your best friend 
-KC
Feeling too lazy at the moment to do much brainsweat, but I’d recommend going to gamepc.com and looking at the setup on their sample rigs. Then go back to whatever site you choose and make similar choices. The techs at gamepc really know their stuff.
Do I still get to be your friend? 
I don’t know how much $$$ is backing up that “splurge” but…
Here’s what I would pick if I were buying it for myself. I’ve discovered the joys of RAID, so I went with a mb with a builtin RAID controller, and hence the second Maxtor HD. You could also save money in the speaker dept. if you don’t need high-end sound and skip the MS Office bundle if you know you won’t be doing anything but playing games. I picked Win98SE as that is still considered to be the most game-friendly OS.
If you really want a rock solid gaming rig and money is no object, look into Falcon Northwest and AlienWare for the absolute best.
You can keep the dollar but a real best friend would ship this rig to my house for, oh, say year’s worth of testing first. 
BOARD: MSI KT3 ULTRA-ARU VIA KT-333 CHIPSET W/RAID, ATA-100/133, USB 2.0 MAIN BOARD (+ 45)
CABLE: ROUND CABLES FOR FLOPPY / HARD DISK / CD / DVD / CD-RW / DVD-RW DRIVES (+ 19)
CAS: S-1 ALUMINUM ATX MED TOWER 320 WATT CASE W/ SEE-THROUGH WINDOW+ NEON LIGHT
CD: 16X DVD-ROM
CDRW: PIONEER DVD-RW + CD-RW DRIVE [1X / 2X DVD-R, 1X DVD-RW, 4X / 8X CD-R, 8X CD-RW] (+ 249)
CPU: AMD ATHLON XP 2100+ [1.73 GHZ QuantiSpeed] 266FSB SOCKET A CPU (+ 1625)
FAN: CERTIFIED CPU FAN, HEATSINK & 2 EXTRA CASE FANS (+9)
FDD: MITSUMI 1.44 MB FLOPPY DRIVE
HDD: MAXTOR 80 GB ATA-133 7200 RPM HARD DRIVE (+ 29)
HDD2: MAXTOR 80 GB ATA-133 7200 RPM HARD DRIVE (+ 129)
KB: [SILVER] MULTI-MEDIA PS2 INTERNET KEYBOARD
MEMORY: 512 MB PC2700 DDR-333 MHZ
MODEM: 3 COM US ROBOTIC PCI 56K V.90 HARDWARE-MODEM (+ 45)
MONITOR: PERFECT FLAT VIEWSONIC 19-INCHES E90F .21 DPI HORIZONTAL SVGA MONITOR
MOUSE: MICROSOFT OPTICAL INTELLI-MOUSE 5-BUTTON (+ 11)
NETWORK: 3COM 905 BTX 10/100 NIC (+ 39)
OS: MS WINDOWS 98 2ND EDITION (+ 0)
POWER: UPGRADE TO 360 WATT POWER SUPPLY (+ 19)
RAID: ATA-100 RAID CONTROLLER CARD — Must select 2 same size Hard Drives below (+ 59)
RAID2: RAID-0 [DATA STRIPING]; WITH 2X HARD DRIVES … [NO CHARGE]
RUSH: NO; SHIP OUT IN 5~10 BUSINESS DAYS
SOFT1: MS OFFICE 2000 SMALL BUSINESS EDITION (+ 189)
SOFT3: FREE NORTON 2002 ANTI-VIRUS
SOUND: CREATIVE LAB SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY 5.1 W/IEEE-1394
SPEAKER: [BLACK] KLIPSCH PROMEDIA 5.1 500 WATT THX SURROUND SPEAKERS + SUBWOOFER (+ 230)
USB: STANDARD 2X USB 1.1 PORTS
USB2: STANDARD 2X USB 2.0 PORTS
VIDEO: [NEW !!!] NVIDIA GEFORCE-4 TITANIUM 4600 128MB DDR TV-OUT/DVI-OUT 4X AGP
WARRANTY: STANDARD WARRANTY PLUS 1 YEAR ONSITE SERVICE (+ 29)
Subtotal: 2726.00
Whoops. I just noticed that I selected a RAID PCI card. Don’t need that since the mb already has it. And skip the 16X DVD drive as I already selected a Pioneer DVD-RW.
I’d skip the money spent on an IDE RAID system as it nets you little gains in the performance department. If fault tolerance is important to you then go for it. Also, the IDE RAID capable boards offer more connections so you have plenty of room for expandability in adding devices to your system (assuming your case has room for them).
If money really isn’t a consideration then get yourself a SCSI RAID card and fast SCSI harddrives. That will net you a performance gain but is gonna cost ya.
MSI makes a fine board as does ABIT. You can’t go wrong with either of them.
I wouldn’t bother with RAID: you may get a slight increase in performance, but for gaming you’re not going to notice it. A single 7200 RPM drive is all you need.
Also, consider if you really feel it’s worthwhile to invest in an immature technology like DVD-RW - standards are still being fought over, and once a victor emerges you may end up with a $250 paperweight. Better to buy an inexpensive CD-RW drive unless you need to burn DVDs now.
Not knowing how much a “splurge” is in US dollars, I will 2nd Alienware and Falcon Northwest. If “splurge” is only a grand or so, or you REALLY want to build your own. Then go with the fastest AMD, a good KT333 w/ raid and USB 2.0 mobo (MSI, Asus,etc) at least 512 of PC2700 at least a SB Live!, at least a base GeForce 4 (nonMX), InteliMouse 3.0, 80+gig 7200rpm HD, monitor and keyboard of choice and a decently fast CD-RW. I’d also skip the DVD burner for now. Although <drool> it would be nice, the dollars spent on it and the chance that what you get may not work like you think it should, is just to much risk. Spend more than you think you should on the case and CPU fan.
dead0man
Ok, ok, I get into a lather over new technology. Skip the DVD burner and go with a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. You’ll definitely want to be able to make backups of your games if you have what I do: a five-year-old boy with his own computer and wants to play “daddy’s games”.
I’ll stick by my RAID choice as I do a lot of video editing and frequently transfer large files. Games that utilize huge swap files, a la Dungeon Siege, would get an incremental boost from a RAID 0 setup. The only caveat is that when you want to upgrade your HD, you must replace all the ones in the RAID at the same time.
For those whom money is not an object check out UGeek’s Insane System. Only a paltry $973,688.00! Most of the cost comes from the 12 solid state 3.2GB drives, 16 50" plasma screens, and the Martin Logan speaker system.
Oops, forgot my last paragraph. The newest processors are running hotter than ever. You may want to check out a water cooling system, like those found at http://www.iceecomputers.com. They’ve also got some awesome looking cases on the second page of their Cases & Power Supplies link.
Water cooling’s unnecessary unless you’re doing serious overclocking. Any standard CPU run at its specified clock speed will work fine with its recommended fan.
If you really want to get the highest performing system available, I hate to say it, but at the moment the fastest P4 outperforms the fastest Athlon XP in almost all benchmarks.
BTW, Horseflesh, I’d love to see any published tests you’re aware of showing throughput of entry-level RAID cards running RAID-0 is noticeably improved over that of a single drive. I haven’t found any; all the articles I’ve read suggest that while these cards may provide improved reliability, the performance improvements are negligible or completely nonexistent. I’m not trying to be confrontational, here, I’d really like to see them.
Running with Scissors - Just personal experience really. I upgraded what used to be a Celery500 to a 1.2G AMD Thunderbird and a new Asus mb. I took the existing 30G Maxtor HD and matched it with an identical one and setup a an array with the onboard RAID. Curious as to the claimed throughput speeds of a RAID, I put it through the benchmarking prog that comes with Norton Systemworks. Compared to what I remembered the old benchmarks with the C500 were, there was a significance difference in throughput, which really can’t be explained by the processor upgrade. IIRC, the IDE channels had identical mode capabilities. I also notice that when a single HD was formatted, it lost about 3GB to the formatting. When I formatted the 2 x 30GB together as a single 60GB, I still only lost 3GB instead of the expected 6. Another pleasant surprise! YMMV.
Re: water cooling. From what I’ve been reading at overclockers sites, the cooler you can keep your CPU the longer you extend its life. I’ve read some experiments that had a water cooling system keep the CPU at or just above room temperature. Of course, as often as I upgrade I’d probably never reach the end of a CPUs life.
Hardly a conclusive test; I’d want to see benchmarks done on identical motherboards, with and without the RAID, before I was convinced. Remember, IDE has high CPU overhead relative to SCSI, so it’s quite possible that the change in CPU and motherboard (i.e. different chipset) were what improved your performance.
Regarding water cooling: yes, it’s true that technically the cooler you run your CPU, the longer it will last, but if a CPU is run within spec, it will be obsolete long before it fails (if it ever does, which is extremely unlikely). Considering that most water cooling systems cost as much as (or more than) the cpu they’re meant to cool, it seems like an unnecessary expense. I have never encountered, or even heard of, a non-overclocked, air-cooled CPU failing for reasons relating to cooling, other than the fan failing or the CPU losing contact with the heat sink.
Running with Scissors - seems we’re hijacking this thread. OK, I Googled on “IDE RAID benchmark” and came up with this article from Tom’s Hardware site on the Promise FastTrak66. My Asus mb has a builtin FastTrak100 so we might assume that it’s as good or better. There are benchmarks at the end of the article (a good 10 clicks in). From the article:
I have my stripe set to the smallest chunk setting. I believe I switched to new IDE cables so that may have helped. This screenshot is not as helpful but shows 2 Maxtor drives in a RAID 0 on an Abit mb. The overall throughput is higher than the Maxtor posted 57MB/s for a single drive. Convinced?
Water cooling revisted: well, I did say I was building it for me (first post). Of course I would try overclocking if I got a water cooled system, I think thats the whole point (of water cooling). You can turn your Athlon XP 2100 (1.73GHz) into say a 1.9GHz (which won’t come out til 4Q or next year) for $150 and you can have it now. Not too shabby an investment, IMHO. Note to KidCharlemagne and other readers: Do not overclock if you are not positively sure what you’re doing.
Hijack over, I hope.
Oops, looks like we forgot to look at gaming peripherals. You didn’t mention what kind of games, but for flightsticks, gamepads, wheels, pedals, throttles and more you usually can’t go wrong with CH Products or Saitek.