Question : Problem: Need advice on building a pc

I am willing to give a lot of points to the expert who can answer this and will take the time to give me a great deal of details on building a pc. I will be expecting at least the following details in your answer...
1) What is the best mother board to buy and why? Explain different types and give your opinion on brands.
2) What CPU is the best to go with and why? Again, explain the reasons for your choice.
3) ISA vs SCSI hard drive systems? Details on a good scsi board.
4) Operating system... Win 98 or Win NT ???  Opinions...
5) Bios?
6) Chip Sets?
7) Type of memory?
8) ETC. ETC. ETC>
Let me point out that I have repaired and modified a lot of systems in the past, So I do understand the basics. What I do not understand is the "fine" details of the hardware itself. For example: What are the different types of scsi (wide, ultra, etc.) and why one may be better than the other?
PLEASE ONLY "LOCK" THIS QUESTION IF YOU ARE SURE YOU ARE ABLE TO PROPERLY ANSWER MY QUESTIONS. I WILL FAIL ANY ANSWER THAT IS NOT A PRECISE AND DETAILED ANSWER. I WILL AWARD THE POINTS TO THE EXPERT WHO HAS THE BEST ANSWERS AND GIVES THE MOST DETAIL. SO GIVE IT YOUR BEST SHOT.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COTACT ME DIRECTLY BEFORE YOU POST AN ANSWER, YOU MAY DO SO AT [email protected]
Thanks,
Scott

Answer : Problem: Need advice on building a pc

Here are some sites that have step by step instructions on building a system with everything you asked for and more, as far as the components the list below is the system of choice.

http://www.verinet.com/pc/
http://sysdoc.pair.com/    
http://www.motherboards.org/
http://www.daileyint.com/build/
http://www.cam.org/~agena/computer.html
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~pelham/build.htm


Well first off I believe that the best motherboard is an asus or tyan, I have used these in my file servers for years and not one has ever missed a beat, ever. 0% failure rate, and I have used many boards from both companys.
I would go with a bx chip set with support for upto 450 mhz and a 100mhz bus, Intels best chip and newest chipset.
You can see a product list available at
http://www.asus.com.tw
http://www.tyan.com

Second the scsi card of choice is an adaptec 2940uw, not a cheap card but the best also used in many many servers with 0% failure rate. This card can support upto 15 devices on the one card, and is very fast and reliable, and always the best written drivers are available via the web.
Product info is here
http://www.adaptec.com/products/overview/aha2940uw.html

You are also going to need high quality pc-100 sdram, at least 64 megs and maybe even 128 megs.

The hard drive I have choosen is the seagate cheetah 10000 rpm ultra wide fast scsi, product info at
http://www.seagate.com/disc/cheetah/cheetah.shtml
these drives are the fastest and most reliable harddrives in the world and have 5 yr warrantys.

As for Cpu I would go with an intel pentium-II, the reason is that they are still the most powerful chips in most operations like floating point and such with 512k level 1 cache on board, you have to have at least a 300 to obtain the 100 mhz bus, Others are catching up but intel is still the king of the road. And the pentium-II is the best intel has to offer.
Product info is available here
http://www.intel.com/home/PentiumII/

With a system of the class it would be crazy to run an os like windows 95/98 Nt is my choice for stability and reliability and security.

For a video card I would go with a diamomd fire gl 1000 series video card, I choose this card because I was very impressed with the performance of this card as I have used one of these cards in the past with excelent results, I would opt for the agp card as this is a dedicated bus just for video.

I will tell you this if I was building a system tomorrow, this is the system I would want to have.

If you require any more info let me know.