Maximum PC

1. Asus P4P800-SE i865PE P4 ATX Audio/GbLAN/1394/SATA/RAID
2. Kingston 512MB KIT DDR400 PC3200 CL3 (3-3-3) DIMM
3. Intel Pentium 4 2.80E GHz 800MHz FSB w/ 1MB
4. Microsoft Windows XP Home
5. Pioneer DVR-107 8X DVD±RW Drive Black
6. Samsung 16X DVD-ROM Drive

this is the core help me add-on. budget about $500.00
Case is a 450 server tower. so there is plenty of room.

Get RAM with better timings... Mushkin or Kingston would be fine.



Go with the Pentium 4 2.80C 800MHz FSB w/512KB... it's actually faster than the "E" series... poor engineering



Go with NEC's DVD±RW with dual-layer support... available in black, and it should be significantly cheaper.

If you're familiar with Newegg.com, you should be all set

Already have a hard drive?

for that motherboard i would get 2 512mb (total 1gb) identical dimms for the dual channel and for the sound card the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Audio Card the onboard sound is ok but nothing beats sound blaster

1) better RAM; i would go with Mushkin Level 1 pack
2) Northwood instead of Prescott

looks good
get a good PSU

to be 100% honest, you wont notice the difference with ram with better tiomings, it just makes such a minute difference that it barely even shows up in synthetic benchmarks and you wont even notice it in everyday use,.

I went with a pentium and an ati graphics card last year in my pc and wished I would have went amd and nvidia, but that's just me.

...no, it does show up in benchmarks...depends on what your Pc uses are...my gaming scores did go up for about 8-10fps with lower latency and my overall gaming experience was better....it may not mean much for the average user but latency IS important.