George; Abit, Asus,Soyo (and others) all make good motherboards. A 1.4gig Athlon would be pretty good bang for the buck . Sounds like you want to build high end system, unless your recycled monitor is a really nice one, You might consider a higher-end 19 or 21 inch trinitron monitor. I have a Sony G400 that I really enjoy. I'm running Win2k/WinXP on a AbitKT7-raid with a 1.0 gig Duron with 256mb , G-force 32 mb videocard, 256mb CAS2 Sdram - 7200 rpm hdrives on ATA100 controller. I can't imagine anyone (actually) needing more speed. I would use my money to by a good monitor, once you have one you will see what I mean. Your eyes will thank you. <>< Larry Fisk Fisk Computers Fruitvale, Idaho ----- Original Message ----- From: "George Schubert" <[log in to unmask]> Subject: [PCBUILD] New system recommendations > I'm getting ready to build a new system from scratch, salvaging probably just the monitor and the inkjet from an old Pentium 120 I no longer use. Specific desires on the new guy will be Athlon CPU (maybe around 1.4), 256 mb of 2100 DDR memory, and Romtec Trios hard drive selector (to allow me to set up three independent opsys environments w/o the partitioning headache). Given the 3 hard drives plus other typical components, I'm leaning toward a full tower as a conservative place to start. What I'm looking for are recommendations on motherboards, case (aluminum worth it?, any other nice-to-haves?), backup solutions (tape or whatelse?; I have a Sony external SuperStation already), any thing else. Environment will be average office and internet, no big gaming needs; just an evolving learning system for maybe A+ and MOUS preparation. > The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech support at our newest website: http://freepctech.com