New system, RFC

[jaguar]

ASUS MOTHERBOARD ON A 266BUS????
WHY GOD WHY???
I"ve had 6 of these machines in my hands myself - problems with 5 of those baords, the Asus 266DDR bus board are fucking awful, get somthing with the SIS735 shipset!!!!

Cooler: I plan on overclocking little or none. My major interest is decent cooling, and low noise. Maybe I should just get a generic cooler? Or something like the Volcano 6cu? Mediocre cooler, but pretty quiet, they say.

Athlons double as space heaters, i warm my hands by putting htem over the heatsink when i'm cold (winter here, and yes i run my main box open case - cooler and i take alot of shit in and out of it). Want to OC a 1.4?....I'd say get either full refridgeration or water cooling, water ain't that hard to set up in the end, i've seen my friends system running it.

Get the biggest cooler you can - i've got a 1.2 with a ALPHA PAP on it, still @ 50 most of the time. Remember to clean that cooler out regualry, dust builds up and adds temp so fast its not funny. Swifttech make some huge heatsinks(700g!!) that you could get away with running with quieter fans and still get damn good peformance.

If you have some spare drive bays, put fan slots in them, put a fan card after your graphics if you have the space and one fan in the space thats usually on the back next ot the CPU. On top if this get out ya hole cutting blades and cut a hole directly above teh CPU and shove a bigass fan in there, low RPM so not much noise and the temprature difference is noticeable if you fan blows out. I do this with all the machines i build (averaging 3-4 a week now when i have the time)

IBM drives, yea i have heard of some problems but overall IBM make the best harddrives on the market, Quantum are reliable but not the fastest, segate are pretty good and i wouldn't touch a Western Digital with a 30ft pole.

Finally: I've done HD and memory installs, but never built a system from scratch before. What does everyone do about grounding? Wrist straps? No one ever seems to mention this on the OC sites. Or does everyone just take it for granted?

Leave the pwoer supply plugged in(but turn it off obviously), work on a non-static surface and ground yourself on the power supply before picking up each new piece, i've never had a problem. I'm glad to see you invested a good quality PSU, with Athlons you need it. Remember to plug your moniter in sperately to save stress on it too.

[quote]I assume I'll have enough IDE's? The CD/DVD and CDRW will go on one, the 20 gig swap disk on the other, with the two RAIDed disks on the Promise. Is this okay?

Ifyou plan to copy CDs drive to drive you need to put one of those on the other bus, internal bus transfer on IDE are shocking .