Building my first computer

Fremen

I recently came into some money and I reckon I'm going to use it to build a computer. I'm not too bad on the software side of things, but to be honest I'm fairly cluless about computer hardware.

I'll probably budget for 2000 euro. I'm looking for a sleek-looking, understated kind of a machine (so no flashing blue LEDs on the fans, etc...). I'd like to be able to play the latest games, but I'm not really that fussy about playing them in ultra-high resolution.

I tend to fly through disk space pretty fast, so I was thinking about getting at least 1TB of disk space, possibly in raid 5.

Noise reduction would be a fairly important factor in this build, so I'd consider watercooling. Is it easy to do? If I make a mistake am I going to be landed with a useless, soggy core2? I wouldn't mind playing around with overclocking either.

I was thinking of splashing out on four gigs of ram, which would mean I'd have to use a 64-bit OS. Has anyone used XP or vista 64? Are there any issues I should know about?

Is it common to find mobos which support wake-on-lan? It would be nice if I could access my computer over the net whenever I wanted.

If people could suggest some cheap reliable vendors that would be great. I'll be back with about fifty thousand more questions pretty soon, I'd imagine.

8T8

Okay a few tips beforehand.

Wake up on LAN not a problem most NIC's even the built in ones support it these days either way you can buy network cards that do this.

RAID 5 is nice in theory but slow in practice, some dedicated (read expensive) RAID controllers may offer better performance but you will take a size able hit if you use the RAID 5 built into the motherboard. If your not too concerned about HD performance then this isn't a problem also I think Intel is gunning for RAID 6 or something to replace RAID 5 don't know if anything performance wise has changed or what boards its on.

What you could do is RAID 0+1 (striping & mirroring combined) or just JBOD (spanning only if drives goes down data on the drive is lost data remains intact on all other drives).

I would stay away from water cooling if you have limited computer building experience your jumping in at the deep end with lots of potential for things to go wrong.

4GB's of RAM with 64-bit is for the most part fine as long as you plan your build well and make sure all your hardware is supported as 64-bit Windows will only work with WHQL 64-bit drivers so you must make sure everything you have is supported. However do you have an actually need for all that RAM if no then your probably better of with 2GB and a 32-bit OS.


Case: (awfully subjective here so find something you like)
Lian Li PC-A16B (review) (site)

PSU:
Seasonic S12 650W power supply (high quality and quiet)

HD:
Seagate 750GB HD (buy as many as you need to get 1TB whether in a RAID array or not)

DVDRW:
Samsung SATA DVDRW drive (quiet enough in use and black to match case)

CPU:
Core 2 Duo E6850 (3Ghz dual core)

RAM:
Crucial Ballistix 2GB DDR-2 800 (very reliable RAM if you want 4GB just buy a second pack)

Mobo:
Gigabyte P35 board (comes with all the bells and whistles plus WOL support)

GPU:
ATI Radeon 2900XT (if going 64-bit better to have ATI as 64-bit driver is much better than NVIDIA's but 8800GTS is better GPU with AA enabled, if not using AA then 2900XT is the same as 8800GTS or even the 8800GTX)
or
GeForce 8800GTS (fine for 32-bit not advisable for 64-bit OS drivers very poor in performance and buggy)

Total €1500 thereabouts.

You can of course skimp on things like the CPU/PSU/GPU if you need to buy more hard drives or whatever else, not sure if you need a display or not but if so get one of these LG 22" widescreens.

Edit: CPU cooler like the Zalman 9500 will keep the noise level under control.

Fremen

Nice one, cheers for the advice.
I guess I'll go read up on all that stuff