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Originally Posted by tiachopvutru
I feel fingers pointing at me that say "U PHAILED!"
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Nah, don't think that. It's NOT an easy job to put a computer together, so be proud of yourself if you manage to make it run as expected. It requires a lot of research and a lot of knowledge about what goes where. Trust me, before building my own custom machine, I had no idea DDR2 was physically different from DDR, and that CPUs had different sockets. I learned 90% of what I know about hardware during those short 3 weeks of planning my purchase.
Now onto your components.
Your Mobo looks fine. It supports the CPU you picked, supports DDR2 800 and has one PCIe slot - Since I'm a bit picky on this, I tend to preffer Mobos with at least two, but they tend to be much more expensive. Since you're not planning on gaming hard, as you said, then you might not have a problem with that - and trust me, 95% of people don't. 4 ram slots and 4 SATA connectors - which I think is the norm. I have 6, and I bet I'll never use all of those - it's overkill. It has GLan and the Audio card built-in into it smells good quality. Can't go wrong with a product with that many high reviews, IMO.
Your CPU looks fine as well, but maybe you would consider the
E6550. For about $40 more, you get 133 MHZ more AND stock 1333MHZ FSB, not forgetting the 4 megs of cache that may make a difference. Just overclock it - C2Ds are happy with mild OCs anyway. Besides, it's a much newer processor.
My suggestion for RAM is the
Patriot Extreme DDR2800.. They're the ones I use and slightly cheaper after rebates. They also have better ratings than the OCz you posted. Besides, these are low-latency sticks.
Definitely get a bigger PSU. 430W nowadays is just not enough - especially if you're thinking on going the 8-Series way, although I'm sure the 8600 uses less power than the 8800s, but more on that later. Thermaltake is good, although I think I've heard
hobbes_fan saying he doesn't like their PSUs all that much in the past. ( Not sure if it's Thermaltake, it's been a while, so correct me if I'm wrong. ). I'm not good on that section, so I'll leave suggestions up to the other guys. I'm pretty sure you should consider over 500W, with 600W being the "Sweet-spot" for the moment.
Hard Drive. It sounds good. Seagate is trustworthy, and I have a couple of HDs by them as well. Never had problems. However, for about $10 more, you could get the
WD 320 7200RPM. It's definitely worth it in my opinion.
Optical Drive. ARE YOU NUTS? Are you really considering getting a DVDRW for $31 when you can get a
Blu-Ray burner for
only $445?! ( Obviously this is a joke, the optical drive looks fine. )
Now the GPU. You commented you had plans on buying a NVidia 8600, right? Well, I know the 8800 series kicks butt, but the 8600 and below were actually a big disappointment in my opinion.
The 8800GT is about 150 more than what you would get a mid-range 8600, but it performs DOZENS of times better. Heck, it almost matches a 8800 GTX, and that should tell you enough. That would be my suggestion. If you don't want to spend money that way and just need the video card for display drivers and daily anime-watching, then maybe you should consider the
Nvidia 7900 GS instead. It's not DirectX 10, but since you're going the Linux and non-gaming way, it shouldn't matter. It's a high performer, and at $119, should beat the 8600 fairly well.
Edit: Looks like the information above doesn't proceed as I thought. Even though the Bus speeds are different, it looks like the
8600 GS does perform better in most cases than the 7900 GS ( at least most benchmarks ). The 7900 does overclock better, but I don't think that's such a great reason to buy it over the 8600. It'll really come down to your own choice this time.
Edit 2: Well, it looks like I got the wrong GPU in mind there. Looks like the one being on-par with the 8600 GT would be the
7600 GT, which does perform better than it's newest sister card. Although 3dMark scores are lower, it performs better in almost everything else.
Read here.
It'll all come down to what you'll want out of this computer, so it's your choice. Hope these will help.