My New (Potential) Desktop

That's a very nice system. Because the motherboard supports the hyper-transport technology you'll have the Athlon64 running with a 1600mhz bus speed.

The biggest plus about building your own pc is choosing the case and I must say the one you chose is as* ugly. Check out colorcases.com
I actually own the ATI Radeon 9600 256mb video card and I can tell you that it is a very nice video card. Although, if you want a system that will be able to play games released 4 years from now, you'd need to get the Nvidia 6800 or ATI X800 which have both broken world records in 3dmark. They're both priced around $450 but are available at the moment for individual wholesale.
The 74GB 10K HDD is overkill for anyone who doesn't indulge in HDD intensive tasks. Unless you are one of those, I'd suggest ordering a 200GB 7200rpm 8mb cache hard drive from tigerdirect.com for only $10 more. You will see incredible performance from this drive because it is so dense.

Why did you go with an IDE hard drive and not SATA?

looks good, I would spend the little extra for a SATA hard drive and get the Athlon 64 3200+. just my suggestions. the Athlon 64 3200+ has a bigger cache or something like that, it's been awhile since I read about that stuff, I think that is correct though. SATA drives are virtually the same price anyway, might as well get one as they run cooler and and quieter and faster.

Aaron

I agree with aaron, go for the athlon 64 3200+, i think it's only 60 or some bucks more. Also, pay the extra 10-20 bucks and get the SATA hard drive, you won't have to worry about slave/master with SATA, however with SATA I don't think win xp supports it natively, so when installing win xp, be sure to hit f6 when prompted to install 3rd party drivers, and put in the SATA Raid floppy disk that comes with the asus board, and install the drivers, until then, the bios and win xp will not recognize the SATA drive. I know this because i had only built my first desktop system last week, an amd 64 3200+, 1024 Kingmax ram, ATI 9800 Pro vid card, 160 gb hitachi SATA drive, 8x DVD burner, 52X CD reader/dvd reader, 8-1 internal card reader, sony 1.44 floppy drive, and the Asus k8v deluxe SE motherboard, and all housed in a very nice coolermaster case, with acrylic side window, and a cooler master aerogate II temperature/fan control monitor. My total cost came out to be 1,600 dollars.

I think that what you have spec'ed out looks great, but i would go the SATA hard drive route and up the processor to 3200+. With the help of a couple of great guys on this forum, I was able to build out my desktop, and i'm glad that i did. I'm benching 5,792 in 3dmark03 with the latest omega drivers released on 5/18/04.

One other point to note, you might want to invest in a more powerful power supply. I chose the antec 550 watt true power power supply. If you have the cash, go for something over 450 watts, that will allow you greater upgradeability. Also, i've read that intel motherboards are usually powered by the 5v rail whereas amd 64 motherboards are powered by 12v rail (as are hard drives, cd drives, anything mounted into any bays, case fans), so the point is, get a power source supply that can get you a high 12v rail number, something over 20 i would think (i've read that you need somewhere around 15-18 on the 12v rail just to power the motherboard). In any case, my antect 550 watt power supply gives 24 on the 12v rail, and i find my system very stable with 2 cd rom drives, a hard drive, 4 case fans, internal media card reader, floppy drive, temperature/fan control monitor).

Well if you need any help or run into any snafu's, send me a pm and i'll help you out as best as i can. your machine is spec'ed out almost like mine and you selected the same motherboard that i did, so i'm sure that i'll be able to guide you out of any problems that might arise when you get around to building it.