I'd go with ASUS or MSI before Intel for a system board.

It's not that hard, but buy from zipzoomfly.com, mwave.com, newegg.com. Tiger has a bad reputation for service.

Ok I'll check those sites. Any comment on that particular mainboard and cpu?

Thanks for the tip. I'm still looking and learning so I will check that out also. Appreciate the help.

one more thing:

a few forums you might want to take a look at.

www.anandtech.com
www.arstechnica.com

i'd say hardocp.com, but that's really more for overclockers.. since you're asking about basic system building, i'm assuming you wont be overclocking :P

heh, i'm good at this..

depends entirely on your price range and what you intend to do.

for instance, Intel processors have the clear advantage in video and audio encoding (mostly due to coders being optimized for intel processors), wheras AMD has the advantage in games. and price, generally.

Every system i've built after i got the dell has been an AMD.. so I might be kinda biased. But i'd personally reccommend an athlon64 3000+ or 3200+, and the Via or Sis chipset. The NVidia chipset, last i heard (which was awhile ago, admittedly) was still not quite there in terms of performance or reliability. driver and bios updates since then have probably changed that.

If you want to go even more budget, but still no slouch, i'd reccommend a Sempron(or barton if ya want to go a little more expensive) athlon XP processor, and an NForce2 based motherboard. Shuttle makes a good, low cost option there. fill it with appropriately speeded Ram, and a decent video card, and you have yourself a solid performer on a budget.

In regards to Intel processors, if you want to use Intel branded motherboards, that's fine. They actually do have really good reliability, just no overclocking support. (at all).

Thanks for all the good info. Yeah, I'm not thinking about overclocking, but I really have the itch to put together my own system. I'll be checking out all the stuff you mentioned. Thanks again. I was also thinking of installing a Linux distribution on this system rather than Windows. It would be a big savings. I see from Linux.org that some distributions are noted as "intel compatible" .I assume this is what I would want?. Any suggestions as to which distribution would be a good one? Thanks.

I've never had an issue with any distro being "intel incompatible" :)

i'd recommend for a beginner linux install, you go fedora core 1. I have it, it's really nice. easy to use, but not so dumbed down that you cant customize it :)