Hugh,
A 2000 dollar budget should buy quite a computer. I'm not going to make
specific recommendations because my experience with large numbers of
products is limited. For every piece I found to my liking, someone may have
a reason not to buy it. So I'll just touch on things I've seen others
suffer through and maybe save you some grief.

Case.....buy a decent one....make sure all the parts will fit....CPU
coolers are getting fairly large now, and having enough clearance to the
P/S seems to limit selection some. Of course you want to make sure you have
enough drive bays.

P/S.......buy a GOOD one. Even if you get one with the case, you may want
to buy another one unless you are absolutely sure the P/S will fit the
bill. Specs lie, so verify.

CPU........buy the fastest one you can afford after you've made all your
other choices......It's far less important than it used to be. They're all
fast. Intel or AMD, doesn't seem to matter. 32 vs 64 bit doesn't make much
difference now, but probably will in two years. When will you be doing this
again?

Memory......1 GIG will cover 95% of  all applications......video editing
can be a memory hog.....buy for the future.....plan so that you won't have
to toss a smaller stick for a larger one in case you need it. Faster is
better up to a point.....I haven't seen too much of a difference
between  the two faster busses.

Motherboards.....feature sets vary greatly....decide on what you want in
the board.....I don't have a problem with onboard audio anymore. As someone
else mentioned, Asus and Abit make good boards....I currently have an Asus
A7N8X Deluxe that has given me zero problems. I have seen several threads
about Intel chipsets and processors working more in concert than AMD and
third party (Via, etc) chipsets, but that may be just marketing hype.

SATA RAID is cool. Definitely consider it. RAID 0 (striping) is faster,
RAID 1 (mirroring) is safer. You can have both but I'm not sure a M/B
supports it....you may need an interface card. There are drives meant
specifically for video editing....have less error correction, hence less
overhead and smoother video.....just thought I'd mention that. The video
storage drive should be separate from the main drive(s) for best
performance.....buy a huge one.....video is a hog.

Video.....N-Vidia vs ATI.....heck if I know.    Don't get hung up on specs
here...... anything over 150 bucks is pretty neat. Decide what you have to
have today to get the job done.....6 months from now, if you need more, a
bottom dollar card will be more powerful than what you installed. This is
one of the fastest moving areas as far as innovation. If you need a
monitor, CRTs are still better at moving images, but the LCDs are catching
up. I still don't like the idea of paying all that money to save
space......I bought a bigger desk and saved a bundle.

A few notes......AGP is going down the road.....a faster PCI bus will
replace it. I think that will happen this year.....graphics will be better
than ever with the new bus.....can you wait? or should you wait?   I can't
answer that. Whatever you buy will be old news once you open the
box....don't get caught in the trap of having to have the latest. One
generation older than brand new almost always has a better price/
performance ratio.  Cooling can get noisy....this may or may not bother
you.....bigger bladed fans usually spin slower....and quieter. A whole new
industry has sprung up around the quieter is better theory....research it
out. BTW....Happy Birthday.

Hope this helps.
Michael

My machine.....AMD 2600 XP, 1 GIG Crucial PC2700,  2 Seagate SATA drives,
RAID 0, W2K, PC Power and Cooling 400 watt P/S, Antec case, yada, yada, yada.




>I'm looking for recommendations for motherboard, chip and vendors. I suspect
>I want SATA, a fast Graphics card, and Decent Sound, as well as ethernet,
>front USB, firewire and reliability.

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