leileilol wrote:lso had the heatsplodeinstability stigma so it's a rock and a hard place here (not to mention the VIA chipsets)
Nothing wrong with VIA chipsets. I used them a lot back in the day and they were brilliant. Even on socket 370, the Apollo PRO 133a has better AGP performance then any intel counterpart especially the i815, and it shows in games and benchmarks (witch is why I swapped the Abit ST6 in my tualatin machine for a Abit VP6A, and it was worth the effort). As for socket A, VIA was the norm. The KT133 had a few issues like the PCI latency bug, but later chipsets like the KT333 and KT880 were superb.
My ultimate year 2000 rig would look like this:
Athlon 1266 + Cooler Master DP5-5K11
Abit KT7-Raid
2x128MB PC133 SDRAM
Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 7500 64MB DDR (aka radeon DDR)
2x20GB disk drives for RAID
Sony CD-RW (any brand really, but sony was well priced in my country in 2000)
Labway Xwave-6000 N6B (Yamaha YMF754) or regular Xwave-6000 with YMF724
Chieftec Dragon DG01 black + 3x 80mm fans
Chieftec 420DF PSU
Ahh, the year 2000... I was a teen back then. Unfortunately I was only able to upgrade in winter 2001, and couldn't afford the configuration listed above. I did get the radeon DDR witch I was very happy with, but as for the rest... got a 800 (or 850?) MHz Duron, stock cooler, cheap-ass matsonic motherboard, cheap-ass chinese case with no-name atx PSU, and had to keep the ram (196mb SDR), sound card (ISA OPL3-AX), 4GB HDD, CD-Drive and FDD from my K6. Basically I could only afford the CPU, mainboard, video card and a really cheap ATX case. I have great memories about that PC. The speed boost I got over my old K6-2 was incredible.