I agree w/ madmag9999, I like his setup.
32-bit vs 64-bit: There is no use right now and most likely in the future you will have no use for this feature. It is many many years down the road before we will need this.
History: Intel had the first 64bit processor in the Itanium. However it was based on IA32/IA64 architecture vs x86. It would emulate x86 code to work with it for backwards compatibility. Intel was trying to move us away from the x86 architecture and in this IA realm. However the Itanium had delays and suffered from poor initial performance. AMD was working on extending the x86 architecture to 64bit land. The Athlon64/Opteron use the x86-64 architecture. Microsoft adopted x86-64 and announced they would only be support x86-64 for 64bit versions of windows. This forced Intel to adopt x86-64 as well, which is what is in the new Xeon processors. Itanium is pretty much sunk.
PCI-Expression(PCIe): Not needed. PCI is going to be around for alteast a few more years. There is no need to buy an Intel board now just because it has PCIe and there are a handful of PCIe video cards available. Regular PCI & AGP slots will work fine for the next few years.
I would recommend getting and Nforce2 board that has Serial ATA(SATA) on it. A Seagate SATA drive(biggest you can get). The fastest AthlonXP you can afford. The most ram you can get(get two sticks so you can operate the board in dual-channel mode, this will give you a slight performance boost). Make sure the memory you get meets the requirements of CPU you're purchasing.
Bus/DDR requirements:
266Mhz bus = PC2100
333Mhz bus = PC2700
400Mhz bus = PC3200
If you want to play games pick up a Radeon 9600 Pro or XT like madmag has. If you're not going to play games, no need in wasting your money. In that case get a Radeon 7500 or a Geforce2 mx. Make sure they have "DVI" outputs for your LCD before you purchase the card.
A good power supply is a must. Look for brands like "Sparkle" "Channel Well" "Antec". You don't really need a lot of watts. 300Watts should be enough. If you can afford a higher watt power supply from the same company then go for it. Don't fall for one of those $12 "500 Watt" power supplies, they can cause instabilities by not supplying porper voltage.





