My box is running a 3Ghz Pentium 4 on an Abit P4P800 motherboard. It's got 1 gig of Corsair RAM and an ATI 9800 Pro videocard. I went with Serial ATA drives (2 WD 38 gig drives, 10k RPM on a serial ATA raid device (level 0) on-board, and another single drive of the same type). A CL Audigy Platinum sound card and Pioneer DVD-RW drive round it out. Quite honestly, I had an amount budgeted to spend on a PC from my company, and I kind of went over the top to spend it.

I happen to have just read a review on a machine that uses NO fans at all. The case is heavy aluminum and looks essentially like a heat sink. All the heat producing components have their heat conducted in some form to the case, and the case then disperses the heat externally. They said it worked very well, but was (obviously) not very portable.

I agree about not spending on the processor. I tend to scale back processor speeds a bit and focus more on the video card and memory. Those are often the bottlenecks in a system.

My other hobby is computer games.