Hey all, heres the situation.
Friend of mine has saved up 1k for a new computer system. She's coming over
from the Mac side of things (ibook) so there isn't any existing hardware to
bring over. She's always wanting to build this all on her own, she's tired of
depending on others (apple/friends) to fix things for her.

Thank you to everyone that responds. I hate to bug people on this stuff since I
know how many sites there are that review products. I've been out of the loop
for a while so I'm sorta floundering trying to figure out where to start in on
this and what suggestions I can give her for her build. While the reviews out
there are nice its always good to get real world feedback on this stuff.



CPU:
While I was pretty up to date on the AMD stuff when I built my system in Jan, I
know things have changed a bit, advice here would be great since the CPU and
motherboard are the core of the system.
Unfortunately I don't know much in the Intel world, so any insight in to Intel
sides of things would be fantastic. Also any good heatsink/fans etc. if the
stock coolers are subpar. She's not looking to overclock last I checked.

Motherboard:
This will of course depend on the CPU, but chipsets to go for or avoid would be
great. I'm going to assume she'll go for the options on boards that have
onboard lan/firewire/usb2 to cut down on the cost of add on cards.

RAM:
Looking for stable and large. Speed would be nice but only if it actually makes
a noticeable difference (by which I mean latency issues, 2.5 Vs 2 , etc.). If
going dual channel makes a difference would be nice too. I know back when it
was introduced, AMD boards really didn't get a big boost (if I remember it was
something like 5%) whereas Intel boards got a noticeable improvement. Is this
still the case?

Video:
Art and Gaming.. the 2 big concerns from what I understand.
I'm going to guess she'll go top end (be kinda a shame if she didn't), my
personal taste is to Nvidia, so like the CPU issue I could use some info from
the ATI camp so I can give her a good case for each. Also any word about
PCI-Express?
She's an artist so while some 3D will probably happen (Bryce), it will be kinda
sparse from what I understand. Her graphic emphasis will be web design, 2D
imaging (Photoshop, illustrator) and Flash. Plus most of her stuff is hand
drawn, not digital.

Hard Drive:
I was personally thinking something like a Raptor for a system disk and them
pick up one of the new 16meg cache drives that are due out soon for a storage
drive. Any yays or nays on this idea?
I know Seagate and WD are both supposed to be coming out soon with some
impressive drives and right now Maxtor is putting out a drive with high
capacity platters and 16megs of cache while also working with Intels ICH-6
which seems to supposedly increase speeds. If anyone has any real would
experience with this stuff I'd love to hear it. I've only seen a few reviews
about it.

Sound:
Onboard sound will most likely work just fine for her, she's not an audiophile
so it may be a good way of going about it.

Case:
I know she'd like to LAN party this thing so something the lil thing could
carry without a forklift would be cool but still be solid. We live in Mid
California so while the temps don't get way high we can get up to 90 F so
something with decent cooling (without sounding like a jet, so no Delta 80's).

Monitor:
The cost of a monitor is being picked up by friends so the 1k will be
completely for the system and keyboard/mouse (by the by she's a south paw so
any advice on neutral mice would be cool).

OK so that turned in to a blood novel instead of a post. But I thank anyone
that actually went though all this. I am of course doing as much research as I
can in this but I always try and get insight on this stuff. Again thanks
~A