As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the hardware bug has bitten me. Every night I have been searching the web, reading reviews and making notes. To sum it up - there is a lot of great hardware out there. And there is a lot of crap.

I think I have finally settled down on a configuration that should be both a screaming-mimi but stable as well.

It all built around the Asus P4C800 board slotted with a 3.0E P4 chip. The "E" means it has 1mb of second level cache vs the normal 512k. Video will be ATI 9800 series chip with a 10k SATA drive to store stuff.

This is a bit of a break from my normal configs. I currently have all AMDs with NVDIA graphics. But, NVDIA has not impressed me with their current (outgoing) generation, and ATI seems to have eeked out a lead.

So, now I need to price things out and see how many rebates I can scrounge up.