Dadman, here are some links of reputable dealers we have used here at AppLink.
http://www.microx-press.com/ http://www.compuplus.com/ http://www.a2zcomp.com/ http://www.techstore.com/ http://www.crucial.com/ The last one os primarily for ram. Some have better prices than others, so check out each component you want.
One note, when you pick the case for your system, try to get at least a 300W power supply, but nothing less than 250W. High end graphics cards require a lot of power and if you use a really fast HD, you will need the extra power.
For a modest system that will do the job and won't cost an arm and a leg to build here is what we use:
Motherboard: Super Micro P6SBA
Processor: Intel Pentium III 550Mhz (Slot 1)
Ram: 128MB SD100
Ethernet Card: Netgear FA-310TX
Sound Card: Sound Blaster AWE64
Joystick: MS Sidewinder Pro
Video Card: ATI Rage Fury PRO
The ATI card is not as fast as the GeForce DDR card, but does the job nicely for AH and is quite a bit cheaper than the GeForce and, unlike the Voodoo cards, runs happily at 32bit color depths. It is a good compromise between the Voodoo and GeForce.
Now for the disk subsystem, while SCSI is not as cheap as an IDE drive, you will find some nice advantages with it. Fewer interrupts are used for one thing. The PC based systems have limited interrupts, and that is usually what most folks run into when building out fully loaded systems.
I have a HP Scanner, CD-ROM and 2 hard disks attached to my SCSI card, which only needs the one interrupt.
SCSI Card: Adaptec AHA-2940AU (stay away from wide cards)
SCSI Disk: Seagate Cheetah 9GB (the Barracuda is cheaper, but both are good drives) Quantum also makes some good drives and are a bit cheaper than Seagate. Be sure to get at least a 9GB drive! Windows is a disk hog.
SCSI CD-ROM: Toshiba XM-6201B (40X)
Floppy Drive: Mitsumi or Teac
Mouse: MS Intellimouse
Keyboard: IBM PS/2 (This is an expensive keyboard at $75.00, but it will be the last keyboard you will ever need for your system and you can only get it from
http://www.ibm.com/.....ask HiTech about this keyboard
).
Speakers: Labtec LCS-1030 (not the best around, but they have a small footprint)
For the monitor, Belkin makes some great KVM switches. See
http://www.warehouse.com/ for these. In the search box, look for "Omnicube". Great product and you can get a MAC adapter for it as well. Although the MAC adapter is more expensive than the switch itself
.
Hope this helps.
------------------
Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.net skuzzy@applink.net
[This message has been edited by Skuzzy (edited 06-09-2000).]
[This message has been edited by Skuzzy (edited 06-09-2000).]