Could someone advise me?

[leatherface1974]

I am going to be building my first PC in the near future. Over the past year, I have researched how to do this and have found various walkthroughs and guides. I plan on building something not top of the line, but WAY better than what I have now (Sony Vaio PII 333mhz).

Now, most of my questions have been answered by reading previous faqs (here) but there are a few issues that I'm still unclear on. The main issue is the BIOS and how to go about setting it. Now, since I don't have the pieces yet, Im not going to get too involved here. The MOBO I'm looking at buying is the MSI K7N2 Delta-L. I've read that the BIOS operates in a "PLug-n-Play" manner. So, would I need to set anything in the BIOS when I do piece the pc together? This is what I'm planning on using:

AMD XP 2100+ processor
XFX Nvidia Geforce Ti 4200 card
1028mb ram
Generic DVD drive
Maxtor 40gb Harddrive
ATX form factor case 300watt psu

Would there be much BIOS tweaking with this set up? Also, if anyone sees that Im using incompatible pieces, please advise me.

Thanks for any help/comments that you could share.

[Budfred]

There may be tweaks to do to the BIOS after you get up and running, but probably nothing to worry about at this point. The main one that is often needed is setting the BIOS for the specific CPU multiplier and that is usually pretty easy to do. You will know that it needs this if it seems to read your CPU as a much slower one than it is.

As far as your config, I don't know about the individual pieces, so I can't tell you much there. I am an advocate of making sure you have enough power for now and later, so I would urge a good quality power supply with more that 300 watts.

[pentachris]

Here's (http://arstechnica.com/guide/building/bios/bios-1.html) an interesting read on the subject.

[saphalline]

Awesome link, pentachris! I bookmarked it and tomorrow I will fiddle with all those RAM timings! Gotta keep up my "LoL" title, afterall. ;)

But don't worry, leatherface1974, you probably won't have to mess with all those setting in order to get a working system! :p The defaults in the BIOS usually work fine in new mobo's using modern versions of Windows (98 and up). If you really want to mess with BIOS settings, I know of a couple more that can help. :D

[leatherface1974]

Hey, thanks for the insight! I'm probably gonna be getting the parts together in the next couple of months...I'm sure I'm gonna have questions then too!:D