Originally posted here by chsh
[B]What kind of Athlon? Athlon XP/Barton? Athlon 64? Athlon FX? Kinda have to know that before I can recommend a motherboard.
Sorry, my bad; Athlon XP.


Only insofar as the case and motherboard should support the type and number of drives you want. If you want 6 SATA drives, you probably are going to have a hard time finding a motherbaord to support all 6 natively, and likely will have to track down a specific type of case that can house 6 hard drives + floppy and CD/DVDs.
As far as drives go, what I think i'll do would be to have DVD/CD, CDRW, ZIP, Floppy; and room for two HDD would be quite enough. If I can have room to expand on that in the future then so be it, if not then I could live with that also.

I'm running a unit with a HD with 74.5GB, 31 of which are free. So I wont be needing support for many internal drives. Having two would allow me to play with partitions (which I was brought up to think were the devil, and am now reading slightly different) or to set to write to both disks to keep a backup.

Since you haven't really mentioned the intended use of the system, and haven't decided on a processor, I will make general suggestions:
ASUS, ABIT, and DFI make the best boards in my experience. DFI makes some pretty hot gaming type boards if you are looking to game with your PC (check the LanParty series), and ASUS and ABIT both have some uber-feature-rich boards.
In terms of motherboard chipsets, go with the NForce 2 based boards for the Athlon XPs/Bartons. For an A64/AFX, look to NF3 or K8T based motherboards.
Do these recommendations still apply? We're looking at DFI/ASUS/ABIT with an NForce 2 chipset?

I'm not planning to use the PC for heavy gaming, but would still like it to run top current games smoothly; even if online or network play isn't great. I'm thinking that graphics card or video card would be what i'd replace most often so I'm not too bothered about what card I start with, but if the motherboard would limit me later on, then i'll need to prevent that from happening from the start.

Power requirements, depending on what you want to do with your system. Go no less than 350W on your power supply, preferably higher, although there is a tradeoff there. You want clean, regulated power at the expense of wattage. I've seen 500W power supplies cause system instability because they were $50 cheapo 500W PSUs, while even a 300W in the same system from a reliable vendor was perfectly stable. I would go with Antec or Thermaltake for the power supply if you can afford the expense. Avoid cheap-o big box type store brands.
350W+ reliable vendor, recognised brand name - it is then.

Another question which confuses me aswell is that people often talk about needing extra fans, or cooling accessories because of the AMD processor and other things i'm running; is that true and is there anything specific I need or should be looking for? Also where do they mount?

I'm stuck thinking of a fan being a large white desk fan, inside a case with a stand; and can't see where that could fit

Many thanks for your reply,