Hello everyone,
I need to find the right Desktop Environment for my hardware.

I'm assembling a machine based on a sempron 2300+ (1,59 ghz) cpu, 768mb ddr pc2100 ram and a radeon 9000 (monitor 19" lcd).

I use Kubuntu or however quite often debian-based distros with kde as de (I downloaded LinuxMint 4 with KDE 4.0 beta).

My doubt is not about the distro but about the DE:
Don't you think kde 4.0 could be too heavy for my poor hardware?

Since I don't want to wait between the mouse click and the action but I also like all the new features, which de could give me fast response and lots of apps and cool effects?

Your system has very good specs so KDE 3 & 4 should work fine. I have a system with a 1 GHz processor and 512MB ram and KDE4 works fine usin openSUSE 10.3.

The best thing 2 do would b 2 try out a few DEs and stick with the one that performs well 4u.

I second reddazz suggestion. Remember that if you are using a LiveCD to test your system, the performance will be much slower than it would if it was actually installed on your harddrive. It usually requires more RAM as well.

For example, Ubuntu and its "cousins" usually recommend 192 MB of RAM when installed. Running from the CD, they would most likely recommend twice that amount of RAM (could not find any source to back that up, but it usually is that way ).

Thanks for answering so quickly

I forgot to say the components I mentioned are not the whole machine; I've got a capable hard-drive (40GB) so I'll install for sure!
If you -reddazz- think kde 4 should be fine, I'll give it a try (using linuxmint)