This is a hopeless question, I think, but I'll give it a try. While it's easy to guess at the specs I need for hard drive, RAM, video card, and CPU, I'm stumped when it comes to the motherboard. There seem to be lots of alternatives at lots of different price points, with no clear way of telling what your money goes for. Any advice for learning how to match a motherboard to a system?If it's relevant, I'm looking at something like:Core 2 Duo E68502 x 1048 Mb Corsair RAMNVIDIA 8800GTS 640 MbThanks for your help.

My humble opinion, ASUS.

Messieur Haldol, Perhaps stear clear of mainboards with ADI soundchips if you are going to use onboard sound? Reason: Drivers made and supported by mainboard OEMs = no regular updates. Realtek soundchips get regular driver updates. Unfortunately, Asus uses ADI on a lot of boards. Personally, I would pair Intel CPUs with Intel chipsets. Case you do so and go winXP too, make sure you get a floppy to install the AHCI/SATA drivers. ;-) Vista doesn't need this step. Intel only unofficially supports 'The Matrix' (AHCI/NCQ/SATA etc) on certain mainboards, if you have a southbridge with a suffix, i.e. ICH8R, you're on the safe side. Hope this adds to thoughts, kind regards Jaap