Yo! I had little bit different stepping strategy ;)

First question how hard will you push this system? (we know answer to this, so it pretty far, same was for me, didn't had Multi boxing in mind then)

To answer that, I considered AMD vs C2D in first place, C2D was obvious winner a year ago
next thing is mother board, and here you need to consider even more, do you need Stability vs Bleeding Edge? What futures North and South breadge have to have? Will you Upgrade anything within a half or a year?

I wanted to have Matrix RAID on Intel chips but also thoght of getting one of hot 8800 (they where $490 then), so prise drop on 8800GTS320 sealed the deal with a though for getting another one down the road and setting SLI :)

rest of thing boiled down to having best and quality parts I can get for average not Bleeding Edge prise, lol


All prices is over yea old might be off by$20 now this system can be build for half what it was year ago, also RAID5 was resent addition.
C2D E6600 ($315)
n680i AT1 ($290)
8800GTS320 ($280)
2G 800DDR2 4-4-4-12 ($280)
Raptors in RAID0 (had them for ages)
700W PSU ($150)
LIAN-LI HUGE case ($250)
Hardware RAID5 with 4x500GB 3xspeed of normal HD ($600, I usually go by cost efficient approach, like % per $ vs budget, example: 500Gb was $109, when 320Gb was $85)




Photo camera is really cheap crap, so don't be to hard on me of picture quality



Following articles at end more useful and educational then anything else normal mortal with limited budget can write.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/...february_2008/ Tom's breakdown on best Video Card for Money
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/...black_edition/ Tom's take on AMD Bleeding Edge tech :)

seriously go to http://www.anandtech.com/ or/and http://www.tomshardware.com/us/ and see if PCIe2.0 worth its money, does 8 cores have any advantages over having 8 PC for same money, How much Watts do you really need? DDR2 vs DDR3 and Latency vs GHz on listed memory, and at then end of the day it is Performance vs Coasts vs Reliability Showdown XD