Gowater, you made a good point about the memory. It doesn't make sense to go with 256 sticks, since I'm probably going to be limited to 2 or 3 banks of 3200 by the motherboard. So I cancelled that order...no sense in jumping the gun. As far as the AMD64 goes, I'm a poor grad student...I'm not even buying at the high end of the 32-bit cpu's, so I don't wanna wait until these are in my price range.


Rickenbacherus, thanks for the paint and ms4me links. I like the looks of the 2 sticks of Samsung 512MB deal they have. I think a Gig of memory will be plenty for me, and I've seen some sites that recommend you use multiple pieces of RAM instead of going for one big stick in case one of them goes bad. I don't know how true that is...sounds logical though.

Arkaine, thanks for the powersupply recommendation. And I'll definitely boost my cooling some...what's the cheapest I can safely go on that? I assume I could add more cooling mechanisms later if I decided to overclock my board right? At this point I'm just going to stick with the stock settings I think...though I'm sure I'll change my mind at some point. I did notice one review that showed that the Samsung memory couldn't function at anything under 3 CAS, which they implied was bad for overclocking I believe...but I don't really understand exactly what this means or if it's a major concern.

I appreciate all the pointers and suggestions.