Here are my suggestions. Some of these mean spending a little more money, but I think it's worth it. Heck, have a garage sale, or sell some old CD's you don't listen to anymore.
CPU - Stick with an XP. You can get the XP 1700+ retail for $109 at newegg.com. You will get much higher performance for only a few bucks more.
Mobo - Look at all the reviews. At least
this one wasn't impressed with the Soyo you mentioned. There are lots of good low priced boards. Personally, I can recommend the Epox 8kha+. I love mine. I don't know much about the newer KT333 boards, but some benches have shown almost no performance advantage over the KT266A. I would NOT get an ECS board as someone mentioned. There have been a ton of problems with them. Yes, I know, lots of people have them and they work fine, but lots of people get them and have major headaches. I bought one and it worked, but I had constant minor issues that became very annoying. I replaced mine with the Epox 8kha+ and it runs like a dream. No problems at all.
Case - I am not familiar with that one, but it seems like a good price for a budget case. There is a lot of talk about the importance of getting quality power supply units. You might look into what PSU is in that case. I got an Enlight 7237 w/ 300W Enlight PSU from newegg for like $46 from newegg and it has served me well.
Hard Drive - I agree with others that you should avoid the IBM drives. It's not good when a company's official specs for the drive tell you not to run it more than a certain number of hours a month. I would look at the WD, Maxtor, or Seagate. And I would not get a 5400rpm unless you really have to get more space for the same price and don't care if it's slooow.
Video Card - Good choice on the Gainward GF3 Ti200 Golden Sample from newegg.com, but get the 64MB version. Benchmarks show very little difference in most of todays games and you save $25. That's the card I got and I love it. It comes setup to run in Enhanced mode which basically means it's overclocked by the manufacturer. So you get added speed, the full warranty, and a guarantee that it will run at that speed. Games in the future may benefit from that extra memory, but by then, you will be upgrading to a Geforce 5 or whatever they call their next card. Toms hardware has a great benchmark comparison of a whole bunch of cards
right here. You can see that the 128MB card is barely ahead of the 64. The Radeon 8500 is also a very fast card at a good price, but I haven't used one so I can't comment too much on it.
RAM - Good choice. Kingston makes reliable ram at a good price. If you think you might want to overclock at some point, you may want to look at Crucial, Mushkin, Corsair, or Kingmax.
Fans - seems spendy. you could probably save a few bucks. But if you are concerned about noise, make sure you get quiet case fans.
Good luck and have some fun.
Facebook
Twitter