As some of you may know, I'm moving in with my girlfriend in a few weeks time.

Unfortunately, her flat (in London) is significantly smaller than my (rented) house (in Cambridge), so I'm going to have to downsize my computer collection.

I'm thinking of replacing my main Windows PC with something like a Shuttle XPC box. It's going to be my main hacking/gaming box, so it's got to be fairly nippy, but because it's going to be in Jen's flat, it's going to have to be fairly quiet as well.

It's been a while since I last looked at getting a new PC. Other than my laptop, my last PC purchase was a 900MHz Athlon.

So. My questions: AMD or Intel? The Intel CPUs seem to be more pricey, but if they run cooler, that might be fine. I'm not looking to overclock in any way, and the Shuttle case limits my after-market cooling abilities. 400FSB or 800FSB? How do the PCxxxx numbers on RAM map to the DDRxxx numbers? How do they relate to FSB. If I get an Athlon 3200+ apparently, I need to use PC3200 RAM. Where can I find some big sticks of PC3200 RAM? I'd like to fully populate this box with 2Gb. Crucial only seem to have it in 512Mb sticks.

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.

I'm also planning on putting a 250Gb Maxtor disk in it (which is currently sitting unused on the shelf here), so something that supports LBA48 and ATA133 is a must.