I might need to build 2 systems:

1. For the kids to play video games. It should handle whatever "tough on the PC" video games there are out there. My current Dell PC has no AGP or PCI express (just learned that term on ARFCOM)

2. For me to edit analog videos (including some Betamax) into DVD's. I like the marketing material for Pinnacle 500 or 700. I have at least 40 hours that just need to be transferred to DVD. Would I be better off with a non-PC DVD burner from COSTCO or Best Buy?

What do the PC knowledgable recommend. I can go with either AMD or Intel but would like to keep the budget around $1,000 each.

In researching Intel's line up of Pentiums, there are too many choices--my head is spinning. I assume AMD is similar.

Other "wants" : quiet system, SATA HDD--what size?

Rocket science is much easier...countdown...push button...watch it go...

Thanks for all the response on my earlier post...although I found out I don't have much of a PC. Good for Word Processing, children's homework, and ARFCOM, of course.

As for gaming machines you can help people narrow down what you want to telling them which games you want to play. And how "pretty" you want them to be while playing it.

Lots of machines will run Battlefield 2. Whether you'll be able to tell the difference between a bush and the tank is another story.


I'll be building one in the future and hope to have games like Half Life 2 and BF2 play fairly high on the "pretty" scale. And that means that from the tower up I'll need to put in about $2,000. Probably less if I shop around for components.

So make sure to take the info here and looks around. Never know what is sitting on Ebay or in some uber gamers garage just taking up space.

I just built a AMD dual core. and got all the parts at NewEGG.  I would suggest you seriously look at a Dell XPS instead.  By the time i got mine running, I coulda just bought a dual core XPS, 1 gig ram, etc without the headache of building one.

Quoted: I just built a AMD dual core. and got all the parts at NewEGG.  I would suggest you seriously look at a Dell XPS instead.  By the time i got mine running, I coulda just bought a dual core XPS, 1 gig ram, etc without the headache of building one.

you must have done seriously wrong....Home made PCs should ALWAYS be cheaper than their Brand-name counterpart...

+1 on www.Newegg.com though

me thinks my built one is faster than the dell, but for the hassle...