Building a New PC

Hey guys, Well I'm about to get some pieces together to build my sister a new pc, which yes ... i will enlighten with OSX.
She is sick of windows, but cant justify the price vs power of an iMac and i can build a pc very cheaply.
So far for the list I have
Intel Core due (E8400) 3ghz
2 x 250gb sata H.D.D for dual booting
Thats about all really
Video cards? PCI-E, AGP ? I want something around 512 for games (doom 3 etc)
Ram ... Brands to go for? Does leopard support 4gb of RAM? ddr2/3 ???
M/B Something with an onboard audio card and ethernet for adsl 2 internet.

I also want to over clock the system (CPU, Video Card, RAM)
I was going to water cool the video card and cpu, and ram if i can
Best motherboard for support?
I can buy a network card if i needed to also.

I have never actually over clocked a PC either, what exactly is involved ...
Would like to build it this weekend so any help highly appreciated

I don't know anything about hacking OSX onto a computer yet (just joined, curious, etc.)

However, I can offer some insight.

For that computer you're looking at $300 for the parts you have already. AGP has been dead for a decade, PCI-E 2.0. Leopard is a 64-bit OS, so it can address 4GB of ram, I assume DDR3 is supported, but not worth the cost.
I tend to stick to Kingston, Corsair and Mushkin personally.

If you're water cooling the graphics card and processor, with an average costing case, PSU, Mainboard, middle of the road graphics card and 4gb of ram, you're already looking at $1000+ without a monitor. Throw in a 20" monitor you're near 1300 without optical drives, any cabling you might need, or a legal copy of OSX (not my thing, but if you want it, that costs money too.)

If you know someone with an education discount available to them, you can get a 20" iMac with a 2.66ghz penryn, 2gb of ram, 500gb hdd keyboard, shitty mouse, etc for $1444, with a free 8GB iPod touch to boot. And instead of a hassle, you get a fairly decent 1 year warranty. Can even throw in 4GB of ram for like $90...

My 2 cents.


Edit: Overclocking RAM is an intense waste of time. Overclocking CPU is more fruitful, but very time consuming. There are a number of forums dedicated to it. On that processor with water cooling you can definitely hit 4ghz without overvolting it too heavily, but it still takes time to get it right, you have to run pretty intensive burn-in tests to make sure it won't get too hot. What does she need it for, anyway? I can't think of too many uses for leopard that you would need an overclocked high end processor. I overclocked mine on the computer I'll probably end up hackintosh'ing, but it was a crappy processor to begin with, on a much cheaper machine.