Reccomendations for $NICE$ system!

[solidous]

I was recently asked to build a supurb system for a friend. He is willing to spend $1,800. Im looking at a t-bird 1200 with PC2100 DDR memory, and a board to support it. Also, the devices will be ide, i already have the cdrom, dvd, HD, and RW picked out, and also the sound card, decoder card, nic, modem, video card, and speakers. so all i really need is a mobo that will support it! Thanks!

[NDD]

Dude !
Currently there're very few mobos supporting DDR memory, in fact, I hardly saw somewhere IWILL KA266 DDR board with ALiMAGIK 1 chipset and some TYAN mobo with AMD-760 chipset. Also, DDR memory is very expensive right now and hardly reachable, too.
What I personally advice you, is to purchase some good KT133A based board (supports 266 MHz bus), with good old PC133 support but with VIA 686B bridge, which will give you ATA/100 support. The difference between this one and DDR is hardly 3-7%, which of course not worth the price.
I use ASUS A7V with 1.2 T-Bird on 200 MHz bus, with Infenion 512 MB PC133, and have to tell you that your friend won't be disappointed with this one neither ...

[AMD kicks]

I have to say $1800 isn't that much if you include the price of a good monitor. A average 15" LCD is already $800. CRT is out of date pretty much now, and then you have to get a compatible video card for the LCD too.

[NDC]

I wouldn't recommend buying a LCD screen to anyone. The pixels go bad naturally. Wouldn't you hate to see black dots on your $800 LCD monitor?