Like I said, I've got the peripherals down. And a case isn't an issue, as I'm going to be using the one I've already got and taking the current stuff out of it to later be used in another case for my wife (but I need to get an LCD monitor for her for space reasons and I don't have the scratch for that right now).

All I really need is advice on what processor, motherboard, and memory to use. And I'm not looking for a ``go get this one''. I want to vaguely understand the issues so that I can come to a reasonable conclusion on my own. It's just that I'm so out of touch that I don't know quite where to start.

As far as your Asus suggestion, I'd have agreed a while back, but a friend of mine had a lot of problems with two different Asus motherboards he got. One required him to solder a jumper wire onto the motherboard because they implemented AGP incorrectly. Another had real weird memory issues. I don't know if he ever got to the bottom of that -- it may have turned out not to be a motherboard problem. One or the other of those also had that can't use DMA thing I mentioned above.

Now, I don't have a problem with Asus, but (after I make a determination as to what specs I want) I'd rather have a specific model suggestion with real-world experience than a brandname liking. I've just come to the conclusion that brands aren't that consistent any more.

Also, I've plotted some price per GHz charts, and while the knee in the curve is not as significant as I was expecting (except the second one for the fastest AMD processors), it's well before the next-to-fastest CPU. As shallow as the curve is, I'll probably be taking final price into consideration more than the price to performance ratio.