At first i was just going to purchase a Dell Inspiron 531 but im just thinking of building my own to save myself from upgrades and the fact everyone says dells suck, im currently running an emachines. I'm not an amazing hardware know it all, haha so if you guys could help me a lil please

I'll be using this computer for photoshop, adobe after effects, VB.net, etc. but not really any hardcore games.

First off im hoping everything can fit into this -
XION Onyx XON-303 Black/Blue Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

As for hardware:

Motherboard:
No idea, something that can run with an AMD Processor.

Processor - im thinking of a AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6GHz Socket AM2 65W Black Edition Processor unless any of you think a downgraded version such as the 4800+ or 4600+ would be fine for what im doing.

RAM: OCZ Reaper HPC Edition 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory. Heard this was a good tell me if you think otherwise.

Hard Drive: Probably something along the lines of western digital. I only need 250 GB or so.

Video Card: something along the lines of a NVIDIA GeForce dont know exactly what one im not gunna be doing any hardcore gaming.

Sound Card: no idea tell me a good one

CD drive - no idea give me some suggestions. Ide like a cd/dvd RW.

Think thats everything. If im missing anything please tell me.

Hi TragiK,
Firstly, I'd like to welcome to CompuForums - it's good to have you here. I hope you will be on the board for a long time, and if there is anything I can do to make your experience better please let me know. We are here to help you, so it would be appreciated if you could help us by posting in threads as well as your own. By doing so, you are helping to keep this site running in the future, and we will respond to your thread faster too. If you can't help us, then we can't help you.

If you want the best CPUs out right now, then you probably want to get a Core2Duo - and if you really insist on buying AMD hardware, wait for their quad cores to be released - AthlonX2s will fall in price pretty rapidly.

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Same as what Ash said, Core2Duo are great but if you insist on AMD and don't want to wait that processor will run fine and will handle with ease the programs you mentioned.

Motherboard for that processor is quite open, I am an ASUS fan so here's a good one:
Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 Skt940 nForce 570SLI Dual PCI-E x16 Dual Giga LAN +8ch.audio Firewire ATX Motherboard - M2N-SLI DELUXE - microdirect.co.uk

As for Hard Drives, any will do, if you like really quick loading times the a Western Digital Raptor would work fantastically with those programs, but if cost is an issue then a 250GB WD SATA2 will also work great and run very quickly, such as:
250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 SATA II 300 7200rpm 16MB cache Hard Disk Drive oem - WD2500KS - microdirect.co.uk

The motherboard has on-board sound, and unless your planning on running a large posh surround then IMO you won't benefit from a PCI sound card, if you are planning running 5.1//Digital then this one work very well and isn't very expensive:
Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI 6 Chan. Digital in/out soundcard (E3307) - E3307 - microdirect.co.uk

For the Optical drive I recommend a DVD+/-RW because there so cheap and you get the added benefit of being able to write DVDs, heres one that I've used and never had any problems with, it's also SATA which I prefare over IDE because of speed, although there isn't noticable difference with optical drives yet: Samsung SH-S183L Black DVD +/-R/RW Lightscribe DL SATA OEM SH-S183L BEBN

Graphics card - I also like GeForce cards, no reason, just do, for what you will be doing a 7600 will be OK such as this one:
Gigabyte GF 7600GT SLI 256MB DDR3, PCI-E, DVI, HDTV Out, Retail - GV-NX76T256HI-RH - microdirect.co.uk
although if you want to future proof then I recommend a 8800, although more expensive the benefits are noticable, and if you plan on going Vista then IMO Vista will run far better with an 8800, heres one:
Gainward GeForce Bliss 8800GTS 320MB PCI-E, DVI x 2 - 718462 008330 - microdirect.co.uk - also, 8600s are cheaper, but there not much of a medium between 7600s and 8800s, but if they take your fancy go for it!

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Living life to the fullest it can possibly be!
AMD Phenom Quad-Core 9500, OCZ 4GB PC2 -6400 RAM, GeForce 8800 GTX Ultra 768MB, 150GB Raptor. 500GB WD HD

id wait a bit and get a amd triple core processor

So I'm not good enough to have a tri-core cpu recommended for me?

can you afford one?

triple core ???

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Ubuntu 8.04.1

Gnome 2.22.3

Ya, amd will soon be releasing the phenom, which includes dual, tri, and quad core versions. And Dylan, it all depends on how much they're gonna cost.

well the way you jump around waiting to order your current setup.... i dont think youd survive