For the indicated budget, I suggest building a system around an AMD Socket 754 (Athlon 64/Sempron) cpu.

ASUS K8N4-E DELUXE $87 (bad ass board for the price)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131533

 

It doesn't have an AGP slot, no go on that one. Any other suggestions?

 

PCI-e is a new bus technology that will eventually replace traditional PCI and AGP slots. Is it necessary to have an AGP slot, because you already have an AGP card? If not, there's no point in sticking with AGP. If you would like to read up more about PCI-e and its benefits over AGP, I've provided you with a link to do so:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device..._graphics.mspx

Other than that, the aformentioned board has badass integrated 8 channel sound w/ an optical output! OKay enough, if that's not good enough I'll suggest something else.

 

See, that's part of the learning process, I thought PCIe was the outgoing technology. Thanks for the link, I'll read up on it......Aight, I like that board, now I gotta see if I can find a moderately priced video card for it.

 

Can anyone else give any suggestions or any other info you think I might need?

This is what I have come up with so far:

ASUS K8N4-E DELUXE Socket 754 NVIDIA nForce4 4X ATX AMD Motherboard $87
AMD Athlon64 3200+ CPU $193.99
XFX GeForce 6600LE PCIe Graphics card $80.00
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA 160 GB HD $60.00
Wintec AMPO DDR400 184pin SDRAM 1GB $75.00
NEC ND3540A DVD/CD Burner combo burner drive $42.00

All I gotta do now is find a case for it w/power supply and fans and I'll be good to go, right? What do you think about this setup?

 

There's actually a computer show down near Baltimore I wanted to stop by yesterday but just ran out of time. I purchased all my parts from one vendor and put it together in my living room. Piece of cake.

3-4 years ago I got nice tower case with 6 fans, ASUS mother board A7V8X-X, AMD 1.8GHz processor and 1.5GB of ram for like $500. I didn't need a hard drive since I had 2 already. Also swapped my AGP video card which had 256mb of RAM.

But now I need to upgrade too since I'm having problems playing HL2.

 

Agreed. Putting them together is easy, it's figuring out the problems, should they arise, that is a PITA. I just hope everything goes smooth for me on this build.

Also, instead of the mobo and CPU previously listed, I'll be going with the following socket 939 setup. It gives more room for upgrades in the future(dual core CPU) and has 4 PCIe slots as well as 3 PCI slots, 4 SATA headers and 3 USB 2.0 headers.

ABIT KN8 NVIDIA Socket 939 motherboard $94.99
AMD Athlon64 3200+ socket 939 CPU $169.99

Also going with a Samsung DVD/CD Burner, it writes faster and it's access time is faster as well, also $3 cheaper!

 

come on guys, I need some help/suggestions here

 

If you are looking for to build a decent P4 based PC, and still need AGP capability as opposed to PCI-E, I would say go with an Asus P4P800 (you can also go with P4P800S, which is a single channel ddr only, doesnt have firewire, but it's much cheaper than P4P800).

I'd start off with that motherboard, 1 gig of DDR, and a 3.2 P4. For a video card I'd get ATI 9800. The whole thing should run you around $500, and then you can start adding all the nifty features, such as top of the line sound card, $600 graphic card, etc.

 

Since AGP is aging, I'd like to go with PCIe since it's the tech of the future.

I will never pay $600 for a graphics card, EVER.