You do know, many games hardly take advantage of multi-threading, hence a dual-core is pretty much utterly worthless in today's gaming market, but given the fact they are cheap now, there's no reason to not have the second core.

The Intel Core 2 is THE processor to get right now if not just because it's technologically superior to all of AMD's dual-core line, but also because it can be overclocked to hell on stock cooling if you're into that thing... lots of bang for your buck.

I'm looking at the drives and thinking... "why?" Unless you took old PATA drives and put them in there, i can't see why you wouldn't take two decent size SATA drives and RAID0 them together for max speed.

The only thing AMD has better right now is memory speeds, and looking into their server line I would stick with them there.

Above, ECC vs. non-ECC was mentioned. ECC has no place on a desktop, additionally it is going to cost more and in the end might end up running slower. So stick to non-ECC and especially NEVER MIX! That is very bad to do, so don't ever do it.