Power Supply
This is a part that you don’t want to spend a lot of money on, but you need to make sure that you have enough power. I chose the Antec True Power Trio TP3-550 for a few reasons. First, at $59.99 it was a good deal for a 550W power supply. I trust the name Antec (as well as Thermaltake), which to me makes a big difference as I’ve read that some of the really cheap ones can have some power surge issues. I can’t afford to take that risk.
Video Card
Make sure that the video card you buy is PCI-express 2.0 and also supports DirectX 10. This is a part that you don’t want to skimp on! This is the life and blood of your gaming experience. I chose the PNY GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, which is reasonably priced at $104.99. This will provide great graphics for the value.
Memory
Assuming that your motherboard supports 1066/800Mhz memory, I would go with the 800 (PC26400) right now unless you just kind a killer deal on the faster 1066 memory. In this way, you can always upgrade to the faster memory if the funds become available. I am very picky about the brand of memory that I use in my computers. I usually stick with Crucial or Corsair, not that there aren’t other good brands out there. For this machine, I went with the Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB. I’m going to start out with 2GB and then save money to add more memory, 1GB at a time. You’ll notice that the motherboard I selected has four DIMM slots, so I can add memory very easily.
Hard Drive
Buy a hard drive with the largest capacity that you can find and afford. I would recommend sticking to Western Digital or Seagate, as they are known to be the best. I used to recommend Maxtor, but in the past year, I’ve had two of their drives die on me (they stopped spinning), so I can’t in good conscience recommend them anymore. Stay away from Samsung and Hitachi. When shopping, make sure is it SATA-300 (3GB/s). I chose the Western Digital Caviar SE 320GB HD, which cost $59.99. You will be able to find an even better price if you can find one of these online.