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firefish5000 - what size case do you have in mind?
I went with simplicity and flexibility, a mid-tower that will hold a full ATX motherboard (which you may not need). It will have lots of room inside to work, and for
airflow to ensure cooling is not an issue. Cable management is easier, and you can add in extra hard drives and other stuff.
The compromise is size. If you want something compact, such as what kitamesume is suggesting, you have to pay attention to video card size (it will need to be low-profile), adding in a CPU cooler, etc.
Are you building this rig to build-once and forget? Or, do you intend to tweak and mod and change hardware around? If you get in and out of the case several times a year, even just for basic cleaning, having room to see & for your hands to get in may well be worth the mid-tower. Do you have space/desire for a tower-style, or do you want/need it compact?
Some decisions:
• Big decision on case size, as it will determine some of your components.
• Do you want to play with overclocking? That affects your options at this point. It also affects cooling, both in care of build and fan options. Heat fins on your memory and the size of your CPU cooling block will require a case that has room.
• You have not indicated to use if silence is a high priority, &/or if high/extreme energy efficiency is important.
• No discussion of audio has taken place, although most modern systems have excellent audio chipsets.
• USB 3 and SATA III have been assumed, but watch out for motherboards that don't have those if you're looking at budget boards on special. If you don't need/want a high-performance system, there's no reason why you can't stick with SATA II & USB 2
Video cards:You indicated this is a linux rig, and you indicated you will experiment with the distro, probably often.
nvidea chipset ... nvidea has the best support under linux, and has for many, many years; they've embraced & supported open source for a long time & have lots of experience with it. It's about as close to plug and play as you're going to get under linux distros. The other cards are tweaked for Windows/game performance; their support under linux can often be spotty and can lead to anything from "only" frustration to incompatibility of features.
The Galaxy GT 430 card I listed earlier is slightly superior performance to the Asus card for the same price. That 128-bti data path vs. 64-bit data path is quite significant. My old AGP 8x nvidea 7800 chipset card by PNY is 64-bit, now over 5 years old (and, BTW, still has performance to spare). However, if you need a low-profile card then you have to get the Asus, or keep looking.
Don't neglect the memory recommendations I posted earlier. There was just a
memory topic in this forum within the last month or so ... a good read with good resources.
In summary, I really respect kitamesume's experience and knowledge, but I cannot condone a design that might peak at approximately 250 watts power and put in a 275 PSU. Bumping it up is virtually a requirement, especially for a n00b to building. Also keeping in mind you're a learning builder, every suggestion I made kept in mind simplicity, such as components that are easy to replace, either due to failure or future upgrade ... thus, no unique components such as a "non-replaceable" PSU.
I see a 430 is now listed, and that is far more sane. Usually, if I even bother to calculate power use, I make sure the PSU has at least 100W more power than peak ... so a 350 in this situation would be a minimum. By going 400 and over, you are future-proofing for added hard drives, maybe adding in a second burner, like a blu-ray, jumping to a better CPU, upgrading video card, etc.
While I have avoided Intel personally, the suggestion for an i5-2300 based rig is a good one. You gain quite a bit of performance and energy efficiency for the extra money. I already pointed out the raw difference in GHZ the chips could potentially run at, but I can't answer the question about which would perform better at the clock settings. I think it'll be pretty close to a wash on performance, with the Intel running cooler and using less electricity.
Another expense:
Make sure to install proper surge protection and a Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) battery back-up. A good surge protector should handle over 4000 Joules and run ~$20. Depending on the system you end up building, on the low end you can get a basic UPS of 350 volt-amps or up to a 550, 650 or 750 for more power hungry system. I have several
550 and
750 supplies that run all my critical components (external hard drives, for example), which ran me $45 and $50 each respectively on sale..
The battery supply is not primarily to run your system during a power outage. It is to make sure the power feed to your system is very clean and stable. Minor variations in your electricity can wear your components, such as your mechanical hard drive, and shorten their life.
You can survive brief power surges and drops/outages of a few seconds. If your power fails without warning, you also get 5 to 15 minutes to shut your system down gracefully. APC, as one brand, is very solid and has linux compatibility to connect by USB cable and auto-shutdown if you're not home. They're great for charging cell phones and running laptops during power outages, for other useful examples.
My 750 supplies also power/surge protect my local network & internet: wireless router, switches, FiOS connection. I get about half a day of internet capability on my Android during a complete power out off one 750 ... and I have three of them plus a couple 550s. Where I live, storms have taken my power out for three to seven days about five times in the last two years. These have been good insurance for the last year. Before that I lost well over a terabyte of hard drives with irreplaceable, critical data.
Something to think about and budget for as time moves along.
