What graphics card should I be looking at? I'm planning on playing a load of Half-Life 2 when it comes out, so something that can do that would be good.

The demos of Half-Life 2 that you've seen on the net were running on the latest ATI card if I recall correctly. The Nvidia card was the one being used to demo Doom 3.

I was hoping that the "which card is best for HL2 and D3" question would be settled by now, but it's not. So when I took the plunge, it was with the Nvidia card. My friend Tod's planning on going with the ATI card. I still don't know which of the two will play HL2 and D3 best, I guess we'll find out. Just make sure that if you get the Nvidia card, it's the one with 256 megs of video ram. It's not cheap (about $500.00 US), but that'll really help with the new games. I don't know if there's a 256 meg version of the ATI card or not.

AMD or Intel?

Intel.

400FSB or 800FSB?

I dunno if the shuttles will do 800, but obviously faster is better.

I considered getting a shuttle, but I don't see how I can cram a hot video card, a hot CPU (I just *had* to go with 3.2 ), and a hot hard drive in there and not have it turn into a doorstop after a month of use. Will the shuttles even take a 3.2?

How do the PCxxxx numbers on RAM map to the DDRxxx numbers?

Dunno exactly, but I think that 3200 means that the ram runs at 400mhz (which is different than the CPU FSB speed). My motherboard will do 3200 which I think is 400mhz. My Corsair RAM chips will do 466mhz but the mobo won't.