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Choosing the Case and Power Supply
First, you'll have to decide what type of design fits your work area the best.
There are basically two types of cases:
- Desktop Case (the flat ones that your monitor may sit upon)
- Tower Case (you know what they are...)
Towers come mainly in these sizes:
- Full Size Tower
- Mid Tower
- Mini Tower
ATX is pretty much the standard right now, so don't make the mistake of buying an AT case. They use completely different power connectors and are not interchangeable. Use only a high-quality power supply that is a minimum of 235 watts (bare-bones system only). 300 watts or more is best, especially if you'll be adding components. Cheap cases often have cheap power supplies that tend to fail much faster than a high quality approved power supply. Also check to see how many power leads are coming directly from the power supply. This is important, because you don't want to be forced to use pigtails to connect your drives. (If you MUST use a power splitter, don't use it for either you hard drive or your CD-RW!)
Another minor problem that many people run into is with the power LED connector. Some cases will have a connector for a 3 pin motherboard connection, while their motherboard has only 2 pins. There are adapters that will remedy this problem. The light isn't necessary for your PC''s functionality, but it's nice to have the light in case your PC is so quiet you can't tell when it's on.......
AMD and Intel have specifications for the minimum requirements necessary for their components to function correctly. The requirements for ®AMD Athlon power supplies are HERE.
Make sure there are enough drive bays for your components---and keep in mind that most likely, you'll be adding more at some point in time (DVD player, CDRW, extra hard drive, etc.). It's really the pits when you buy a new hard drive or CDRW and then can't find a place to mount it! (been there, done that)
Keep the system as cool as possible. Add an extra intake fan at the front of the case and an exhaust fan at the back. There are lots of inexpensive fans out there, so don't scrimp on cooling. Check out the schematics of your motherboard---most have several fan headers, and most good motherboards have utilities to continually monitor the fan speeds and sound an alarm if one should fail. If your board has a decent BIOS, it will also be monitoring speed, temperatures, and voltage.
Cheap trick: I remove the fans from old (working, of course) AT power supplies---they work well as an extra case fan. You can use a drop of glue and strategically mount it on the case to point at whatever component needs the extra cooling.
Resources
The Case and Power Supply -- Where to Find the Parts
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