Nerd Alert! Computer Upgrade Advice needed!

[Moogled]

Awesome advice, guys.

In fact, I did read through a comparison article about Intel's Q6600 just last night too. It did superbly against the dual core E6600 but fell short under the two Extreme Processors by Intel, which is understandable.

I will certainly read into more Motherboards but an 8800 GTX might be out of my budget at this moment.

This whole system will probably set me back a cool $2000. I'll update you guys as I buy the pieces. I heard from someone that Memory Express charges 35 dollars to put together a PC; can someone confirm this? Labour hours are usually never cheap.

Thanks for all the help.

[mseepman]

I concur with most of what's been said above...I work in this field for a living and I can tell you that Vista is nothing but trouble still. If you can successfully build this PC and use XP pro, you will get much better results from your efforts.
To give you an indication of Vista's problems, Dell has gone back to offering it's customers XP. Nuff said...

[Moogled]

I've never worked with technical features of Vista, but I've heard both good and bad things with Vista. Some people are impressed with its new security features but I think I'll stick to XP for now since I'm more familiar with the interface.

That said, I can always upgrade to Vista after they've stabilized and worked out the kinks.