building from scratch

[poepdale]

Hi, All. I'm brand new to the forum (as my delightfully low post count will show) but have high expectations. I've read through a bit and this seems to be a sweet place to get info and advice.

I've built a few systems before, but not for a few years and, to be hoenst, I'm way behind the times in what to grab for a PC (I'll talk solaris or hpux all you want). I'm looking for some input or even links/direction to figure out what tech is just behind the bleeding edge curve - ie it was sweet 3 months ago but the new thing is out and the price just dropped on the older one, etc.

I'm looking to build a a machine that servers 2 primary purposes :
1) high end game action
2) a web (ftp,etc) server for (eventually) multiple sites

I'm looking for suggested builds, places to buy stuff, pretty much the whole nine yards. Think I should go water-cooled? 2GB memory enough or 4Gb the way to go? And etc...

Thanks in advance for anyone who is willing to tackle this open-ended n00b post.

[NUTNDUN]

With todays cpu's going with normal air/fan cooled is plenty as they are using lower voltages and cpu temps are coming down. I would say go with either amd or intel dual core processors, and go with min. 1GB memory. 2GB would be great. SATA drives, or if you want to run the SCSI raid array.