I took the plunge today, and my new PC is on order:

• Shuttle SN45G (from Microdirect)
• Athlon XP3200 (also from Microdirect)
• 2x512Mb PC3200 DDR (from Crucial)
  

I've already got these other ingredients:

• Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse, etc.
• Maxtor 250Gb ATA133 hard disk
  

For now, I'm going to be putting a PlexWriter 24/10/40A in it. I'll look at DVD/CDRW combo drives later.

The next thing on the list is a graphics card. I'm intrigued by pca's comment about fan placement. Can someone explain this more fully?

Anyway, given that, I'll probably plump for the ATI Radeon 9800. From reading Tom's Hardware, it seems that getting the 256Mb model is not worth the expense compared to the 128Mb model. What do others think?

More importantly, however: which brand card should I get? I'm a little confused by the plethora of different options. Should I get a Hercules or a Gigabyte? Do ATI do their own retail version?

Normally, I'd have gone for a card from Asus, but they only seem to do nVidia, and apparently, they won't fit.