Hi all ...heres the component list for the pc i am about to build ...

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ Socket 939 1MB
DabsValue Gaming Case 480W
Asustek A8N-SLI PREMIUM S939 nForce4 SLI ATX
XFX GeForce 7600GS XT 256MB DDR3 PCIE Dual DVI
Crucial 2x1GB 184Pin DIMM PC3200 Non-ECC Unbuffered
Maxtor DiamondMax10 250GB S300
BenQ DVD+/-RW 16x Dual Layer IDE Black Drive

i am undecided on an OS at the mo - am thinking of going with media centre - will this work ok with these components ? i think it will but am unsure ( also media centre is a 4gb install where as xp home is only 1.5 ....)
or would xp pro be better ?
this pc is primarily for graphic design (flash , photoshop and 3d design) - is it a good set up for that ?
what would you change ?
any comments much appreciated as although i have spent the last two weeks reading reviews etc i am still open to change on the component list .... my budget (without monitor) was around £600 - the list above from Dabs came in at £620 ... should i :
get another hard drive so i have one for OS and one for media etc
splash out and get a faster processor ? or will this one be good enough for wjhat i want ? (i dont play games on the pc)

any help appreciated
craig

Looks pretty good. You've definitely chosen a good motherboard, which is a good platform. It goes seem somewhat game oriented however. If you tweaked some of the components a bit, you could have a much better general purpose desktop.

For example, an alternate solution could be:

ASUS A8N5X - You shed SLI capability, which is just for gaming anyway. There is also some loss of component quality, but unless you really stress the thing, like say, with gaming, it shouldn't matter
GeForce 7300-series - Again, scaling back gaming performance. For the purposes you describe, 3D performance is unimportant. You retain the G70-class featureset however.
Athlon X2 4200+ - The payoff for your scrimpings; a dual core processor. This will be a very positive improvement to productivity.

Windows Media Center Edition works best with TV cards that feature true hardware mpeg compression. MCE is basically Windows XP Home with the Media Center application. This application presents itself as a sort of Windows Media Player for the visually impared. It's designed to run on lower resolution large scale displays (read TVs), for low profile, quiet media PCs...which this is not going to be.

Don't worry about separate HDDs for OS and User. Partitioning will do the trick. Any theoretical performance improvements gained through different drives is negligible in this day and age even when you’re talking about a pair of Western Digital Raptors.

excellent ... just the reply i was looking for , thanks very much for that ....thats the route i will take !!!
xp home or xp pro ?
also does a larger HD , say a 400gb, improve application speeds? or is this really just the processors job ?
regards craig

No, a bigger hard drive wont speed anything up, however if you're buying a new hard drive, take a look at it's speed (In RPM). The faster is spins, the faster programs will load.

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cheers for that info , much appreciated ..... i have been looking at the spec of the cheaper asus MB and note it doesnt say it has fire wire (where as the more expensive one says it in the spec ) so does this mean it doesnt have the fire wire input but has a connector on the MB for one or does it mean the board cannot support firewire at all ? am confused ! sure;y in this day and age every MB would support fire wire ?
craig

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standard 1394 (IEEE 1394 - Firewire is actually the Macintosh/Sony name for it) is still one of the features reserved for the high end products - not because it is a high end feature exactly, but because chip cost and implementation costs, thanks to the 1394 Licensing Authority, are high. IEEE 1394 PCI cards, which are fairly cheap, can be installed on any machine with a spare PCI slot.