Personal Touches
I leave the choice of DVD burner, speakers, and keyboard/mice to you. Note that if your hand tends to get sweaty while deathmatching, you might want to look at the new generation of "coolmice" that have integrated fans (with optional LEDs for looks) to blow cool air up into your palm while playing. As for keyboards, I'm using the system described here with an old HP Windows 95 keyboard. Over the years, this grungy keyboard has seen me though several thousand hours of Quake, and it's so supple that I barely need to touch the hair-trigger keys. I have the plastic ends sawed off so that my fifth fingers drape around from behind, and the wrist rests are built up with masking tape to fit my palmar surface like a glove. Even with the best equipment, sometimes you need to go low-tech.
In the next part of this series, we come to the moment of truth when we power 500W to our homemade system and hope that we don't smell smoke. We'll also discuss benchmarking and how to build a spectacular windowed case mod.