help building a comp

[wibowo]

Hi. This is my first time building my own CPU and i am confused as to which motherboard or computer case to choose.

i have Geforce 8800GTX, X-fi fatality, pentium 4, 200gb hard drive, 1 sony DVD drive, 1 sony cd drive.

I have been looking at nforce 680i. Is that a good choice? which computer case should i get?

btw, i heard that X-fi causes many popping/crackling with nforce 4 board. Is it the same with nforce 680i?

 

[mindstormsguy]

Please don't call your computer a CPU, the Pentium 4 is the CPU . Speaking of which, what P4 do you have? They aren't all created equal.

 

[vanilla_guerilla]

yes the xfi causes crackling/popping on the asus p5w-dh and the evga 680i boards. i have tried all the popular fixes, ie different pci slot, different drivers, adjusting pci card latency and none have worked for my xfi extreme music. buy an auzentech card, or go with the on-board sound. as for case, do you want tower, mid tower, window, no window, 9 120mm fans, 3 120mm fans, lian li/silverstone $300 aluminum type or $80 aspire type?
nforce 680i is a good board (so far), but there are many good boards. which p4 are you using, do you plan on upgrading, do you plan on sli/xfire, do you need 8 sata ports, how many pci slots do you need, do you want passive cooling or not, etc, etc.
in other words, please be more specific.

 

[wibowo]

wow... and i thought i was specific enough

well, my processor is "intel(R) pentium(R) 4 cpu 3.20ghz" (checked in device manager)

I just need enough for the items i have listed above. Some extra slots would be good though. Maybe 1 or 2 extra slots will be good. I do have plans of upgrading in a year or two.