Actually, I heard the Logitech MX510 mouse is pretty sweet for gaming.
...but then again, I use a trackball, which I think works great.
As for the rest of the 2500 dollars: it's all about balance. You can get an uber-processor, but with a slow harddisk, that's going to be your bottleneck.
Generally, for gaming:
- I'd get a bloody fast videocard (x800-ish, although it's relatively expensive, and I haven't even seen benchmarks...).
- Then I'd get 1 gigs of ram, preferably with low latency, but not too expensive (really low latency will cost you a lot of cash for just a tiny bit of extra speed).
- After that, you need a good *stable* mobo/processor combination. Either AMD athlon, Athlon64 or Intel P4. Just get a cheap yet fast combination. What I mean by that: a P4 at 2.4 Ghz will cost you more than a comparable Athlon processor, so that athlon would be a better choice. At the higher speeds, the differences become less obvious, and it comes down to personal taste.
- I'd go with Lasereth's advice about the harddisks: get a WD raptor harddisk (74 gigs if possible, 'cause it's even faster than the 36 gig version); I have it myself, and it is indeed *very* fast. Beyond that you could get a large harddisk for storage; get one with 8 mb of cache, just because, and sata if you want it (won't be much faster, though!)
- get a good, nay, very good power supply, with plenty of watts, but don't go overboard here. More than 420 watts should be plenty. for now anyway...
as for the sound: most modern motherboards have quite a good on-board soundcard. The advantages of an "extra" one would be: better effects in games (Creative EAX and the like), and, more importantly, reduced processor load and higher framerates in games.
there you go...
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