give suggestion- building new system

[j_dunavin]

Starting from scratch, going to build a whole new system.
Here are my needs, wants and ideas so far.
What i will be using it for: Mainly for multi media, mostly music, and a few movies. Internet and office programs. I do not do any gaming, and any that i would be interested in are very simple, like lemings or RC revolt ( you race little remote control cars) The only other games i have are mech warrior 4, soldure of furtune, and microsoft flight sim. Of which i have never tried on ubuntu, so i have no idea if they will work, maybe someone can point me in the right direction there. Regardless i don't think that these are too system intensive.

What i need: two channel audio is good enough for me. In fact i would prefer to spend my money on a really nice two channel, as i also do some DJ work and it would be nice to use the pc to record my board as i mix to see how it went, and maybe record some demo cd's.
Video card would be nice to have a DVI output as i plan on upgrading to an lcd, but right now all i have is a 15" tube. Maybe i should place an lcd in my budget? Again i do not need anything supper special in this dept.
Hard drive could be smallish, as i will have an external, bigger one. I don't know if i should go with SATA or not.
Motherboard, prossesor, memory, i have no idea what to go with, but here are some thoughts that may help:

I am thinking about doing a small computer like a shuttle, or something, but that is only a thought, my main goals are that it be very quite, and fast. I could really care less how big it is, rather that it looks simple and not have plexi windows with lights.... eww.
I hate lag time as i open programs and wait as i transfer info around on drives.
I could probably get away with one DVD/ CD burner drive?

Right now i have an old AMD 1.3 GHz prossesr, 40G ide drive, 512 mb of memory, and usb 1.0:roll:
I have a buddie who gave me a newer mother board that will take SDram instead of DDr ram, and it has an AMD 1.6Ghz on there. with usb 2.0 on the board, firewire, but no SATA only ide, and it does not support raid, and three pci slots. Should i slavage one of these, or start freash?
Any thoughts or sugestions would be great.
I'm even ok with suggestion for os other than ubuntu. KDE ubuntu? Mint? Some thing that might sute me the best, Though Ubuntu has been very very good to me.

[nixscripter]

1. Playing Windows games requires Wine. A quick look at their app database for compatibility says:

Mech Warrior 4: garbage (not gonna work)
MS Flight Simulator: garbage
Solider of Fortune 1.x: platinum (works perfectly out of the box)
Solider of Fortune II: mixed (some got it to work, some didn't)

I don't know about RC Revolt or Lemmings.

2. If you want to play music to yourself through headphones, a $15 PCI SoundBlaster will do fine. DJ mixing can be done with software; there's a long discussion here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=561729

3. A cheap, stable video card with DVI (which works without fighting with drivers) is an ATI Radeon 9200 Pro (usually between $20 and $60).

4. If you're not going to be doing gaming, video, editing, or something else complex and I/O intensive, salvaging either of those boards (depending on their graphics) should work fine. Linux runs on almost anything ;-).

And as for OS suggestions, I always say this: if you want to use Linux, choose Ubuntu. If you want to learn linux, run Gentoo.

Hope this helps.

[Lord Xeb]

Just got to newegg and gather up some cheap parts. I can build a 500 USD system that eats everything that I though at it :D

[j_dunavin]

Thanks for the replies. I think that i will try to salvage what i can.. since it will be faster than what i have running right now. And since i already plan on getting an external HD, maybe i will look at a sata drive. Then when i decide to upgrade M boards i will be ready. And a Sata card is fairly cheap.