can your "uncle" get me a setup like that for $1000 dollars and you keep the 200 for your help? on a more serious note tsunami did say something important with the HDD. getting 2 (or more ) in a decent raid setup with a high RPM / cache would help you a lot on FPS issues in citys and loading times. also maybe look at a seperate sound card (spare your shiny new gfx card and mobo from working on such trivial things) and maybe even a high performance ethernet card. i gather your going to be using this beast a lot so anything you can shave off of the response times would be good. also the 42 inch is not a good idea for response times, if you can live with it go for 22" with a 5ms response rather than the 30+ ms on 42" (treat it as unshowed lag and you start warrying about it when they all add up over your whole pc)