Motherhead wrote:

Memory
Corsair, Crucial, Kingston or OCZ. I could spend a couple pages discussing latency timings but it would bore us all to suicide. When you make decisions based on Mainboard and CPU and how much more you want to spend, further recommendations will appear.

It used to be that 1GB was generous enough. Then MMHOMORPGs, which benefit greatly from the extra gig, caught fire and a large percentage of the 5,000,000 WoW players started to shove in that extra gig. The result is more boxes with extra memory and developers less weary of writing for 2GB systems. BF2 certainly runs smoother with it, as does F.E.A.R. From what I understand Unreal 2007 (and games based on it's engine) will list 2GB as it's "optimal" system req.

If you take my advice and get an Nforce 4 based board, be aware of a problem that will knock your speed from DDR400 to DDR333 if you fit a DIMM in all four slots, so 2 sticks of 1GB if you want 2GB at DDR400.