First I must admit that I understand that I should just upgrade to the Core I7 processor, but I am currently limiting my money spending. I, however, have been gifted with the luck of having friends that offer me their corporate discounts for certain manufactures, such as EVGA.

This is my current build design and once I end up finishing I will post a pick as well. I am also thinking I should go to a water-cooled system, but I haven't the experience to feel comfortable with such things and as such will be sticking with a mini wind-tunnel.

For the case I am going with a Thermaltake ArmorPlus full tower style. I will have to do some slight modding to make it accommodate my needs, but nothing major. Cost $140.

As for the core elements I already have the MOBO. It is the the EVGA 790i FTW. I love my friends, because I got this MOBO for only $77. As such this is a DDR3 MOBO so I will be picking up 4GB of OCZ Platinum memory. The timing is 7-7-7-24 it is DDR3 1600. Cost $90 The processor is going to be an Intel Q9650 I want to try and find this cheaper, but right now I am going to be getting one for $260. The GPU will be the EVGA GTX 285 SSC Cost $320. This beast will be powered by a 1050W Enermax. It got some great reviews by a source I trust to go overboard while testing PSUs so it defiantly takes the cake. Cost $280

The Hard drives I am splitting off to here. I am planning to run two different RAID arrays in my computer. The first will be what my OS and media resides on. I am building a RAID 5 array using three 750 GB Western Digital drives. This will give me a net total of 1.5 TB of space. Also it will make sure my media stays backed up. The second array will be a RAID 0 using two 320 GB Western Digital drives. One might ask, why would I waste an entire drive worth of space? These will be the drives I store games on. So the sensibility is that with stripping they should access data faster. If I was made of money I would have bought two raptors instead. Obviously none of these will be Green drives since I wish to not sacrifice RPMs. Cost $400

As for controls and such, I am building a wind tunnel and will be overclocking significantly. I am going to need temp and fan speed adjusters/monitors. For this I plan to add in two 4 control Scythe controllers (I love the LCD read outs on these). I also will be adding in a hard drive cooler by Masscool to help keep the array cooled nicely. I will top the cooler with a 120mm fan as well to assist air flow. I am adding in a second 140mm front fan to give it a little more push. My CPU cooler can't be stock so I am switching it out with a Vigor Monsoon fan/heatsink. The memory will due to the staggering needed by the MOBO have a slot wasted for a fan/heatsink. Also a PCI slot will be sacrificed to add some additional cooling for the GPU. Plus since practically all of my stuff has blue LEDs, I will be tossing in a dual tube cold cathode light as well. None of this extra case mod stuff will cost me anything, so I have no need to record pricing.

Overall appearance will be a blue glowing monster. I am still unsure of just how crazy bright my system will be. I do know that my current system is a nice shade of green. The new one will have green glowing LCD monitoring plus a whole lot of blue being cast out the side. Beyond that it should be fairly sleek and rugged. Nothing like the complete custom system I will be building for a new love. Nothing like getting a metal worker to help build you a case that will look like a bunny when I am finished with it.

By and by this system will run me very near to $1500. Now I admit I don't have much money. So I plan to make this build take me about the next 5 months to accomplish, pending personal expenses that might arise.

After thoughts. I have a few things I am hesitating about which will affect cost. I am debating about adding a second monitor which will in and of itself add a decent amount. I also am wanting to switch to a BluRay player in my computer and that will add some more as well.

As for carry over stuff. I will be carrying over my 5.1 Channel Creative Inspire T6100 speakers. Along with my Logitech G11 keyboard and G5 mouse. Also my current monitor, which is a Gateway 22" widescreen LCD. Oh and my Creative Fatality headset too. Silly things to mention, I know, but I have a certain look I am committed to and the silver and black of my peripherals will be upheld in the new build, oh plus everyone loves a blue glowing keyboard! I also have no ideas on what I will do with my old system at this juncture.

Sounds pretty good, everything sounds perfectly compatible from what I can tell. I actually just built my own i7 system about 3 weeks ago and I must say, when it comes to overclocking, nothing comes close to being as easy to overclock as an i7. Took it from the shipped 2.67GHz to over 4GHz with little to no tweaking really needed, on air still running cool. I messed with the voltages for more stability and that was about it. If you already have the motherboard you're kinda out of luck on the i7, but technically if you're spending $260 on a Q9650 its only $30-40 more to upgrade to the i7 and 1366 pins is a definite upgrade from the old 775 pin architecture. Maybe your friends at EVGA can help you trade your mobo for an X58 one. That's actually what I got, EVGA brand and all heh. The only thing that really seems pricey is your power supply. I didn't put in as many harddrives as you are going to, but I have 2 EVGA 9800 GTX+ cards all on a 750W and even with overclocked voltages on everything it isn't maxed out. Newegg has some 1000W supplies for around $200-250 depending on brand, I got a corsair and its worked great so far (just check for sli ready in case you ever find $300 on a park bench and blow it on another GX285 hehe).

My entire build cost about $1700 after rebates, but i didn't need a monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers either (would've been nice to know someone at EVGA, I had to pay full price lol). As for water cooling, its not as difficult as you might think. My last case was water cooled and you can get a nice beginner kit to try it out. Newegg has thermaltake's water cooling kit for either $90 or $130 for the newer version for the whole package. That's what I started with and it was no problem to put in. It isn't going to work as nice as a "real" water cooling kit though ($300+), but it's a real good kit for a first time water cooler. My only gripe was that sometimes the pump would make an annoying clicking noise and after 3-4 months, you could clearly tell your system was slowing down and I had to cycle out the old coolant for new coolant. Also, for blu-ray burners, buy that last, they've been steadily dropping in price since october. I'm hoping by September to see one for around $125-150 then I'll pick mine up.

Here's my specs for comparison:
EVGA X58 SLI mobo
Intel i7 920 - 2.67GHz overclocked currently to 4.2GHz
G.Skill - 6GB Tri-channel 1600MHz ddr3 ram (another great X58 upgrade, tri-channel RAM!)
2 EVGA 9800 GTX+ 512mb superclocked cards in SLI
2 500Gb western digital HDDs in Raid0
750W Corsair power supply
Cooling: 4x 120mm fans, thermtake dual-PCI slot fan (with 2 giant cards, heat kinda builds up in the bottom corner of the case, this pulls enough heat from that area to keep both GPUs around 5C cooler, cant complain at all), masscool sytrin cooler for each HDD (doesn't move as much air as I'd like, but the heatsink does a great job with the included thermalpad), Monsoon i CPU cooler (looks awesome, extremely quiet, moves a metric ass-load of heat, but I had to mod my case and even bend the heatsink on the voltage regulators on the MOBO to get it in >.>)

Good luck with the build and if you need any help I'll give what advice I can

Your RAID config doesn't make sense..

R0 = Striping so you will have ~640GB of "do you feel lucky punk" storage.
R5 for the OS sucks ass because your writes will be slow or you should redirect all your temp folders / scrapdisks to the R0 array.

Be sure you get the WD drives that are suitable for a raid setup else you'll be playing TLER roulette with your R5 array.

RAID5 != BACKUP

Actually my RAID setups do make sense. Utilizing three 750 GB drives in a RAID 5 array I lose one drive of space, but guarantee that I can rebuild a hard drive should I have a failure. So I will have 1.5 TB of storage space and I will partition the remaining space. This is for my Media, as in the stuff I do not want to lose. Namely 300,000 songs, my wallpapers, my PDF documents, my work documents, my anime, and on and on. It is the stuff that I would prefer making sure that I have if I end up with a failing drive. I prefer backing up my OS rather than making it write faster so as such I will leave it in the RAID 5 array on its own small partition.

For the RAID 0 array I am using two 350 GB drives. Since it is using Striping I should get faster read and write times there. So the sensibility is that my games should be on a raid 0 array. Now the understanding in a RAID 0 setup is that if you have a drive failure you lose everything. So no, I can always reupdate and reinstall video games. I can't always get back old media. My array configurations are sensible.

Now as an alternative I could put the OS on a RAID 1 setup. This provides mirroring. The simple fact though is if I place the OS on a RAID 0 I lose all recovery options as there is no error checking and no data redundancy. Also the writing may be slower in a RAID 5 and that is fine, because the reads for a RAID 5 are higher. So simply put if I am listening to music via the RAID 5 and playing games on RAID 0 I should be more than set. Though like you were saying redirecting the temp folders is sensible and I will do this.

@~Xeelot

I lost everything I typed before. I do agree that I probably should sell the 790i on ebay and probably get the X58, but I really think I can land the Q9650 for only $200. As for the why I won't just buckle and go the I7 approach is that I don't want to ride the bleeding edge of the tech curve just yet. I understand that the I7 is Intel reintroducing Hyperthreading, but that it works this time. I just don't want to do it just yet, plus I will easily have an OC to over 4.0 GHZ on the Q9650. I do like the concept of Tri-Channel, but I am still hanging back on the 32X OS and I won't be needing more than the 4 GBs I have going in, until I decide to finally upgrade.

Also the PSU I am getting kicks major ass. This is why I want it and you are right I am going to go the SLI route again in due time. With that said I need the 1000w of power. I am still skeptical of water cooling, due to my long periods away from computer and the constant running. I have a bad, bad habit of forgetting to do regular maintenance. I would hate to burn my system out just because I forgot to top off the reservoir.

R0 = Striping You will get 2 times the smallest drive size with 2 drives. (RTFM)

You can't guarantee anything, if something goes wrong during the rebuild of the array your data is gone.
Also that R5 array isn't going to help if you corrupt the file system or your array gets wiped or killed during a "Oh no!" moment.
Are you sure you want to have a 1.5TB array using a wannabe raid controller?

You are right there in the RAID 0 concept. I accidentally got my line of though skewed towards RAID 1 and hence mistakenly commented there. As for the no guarantee portion, there never is any guarantee, so I will be opt to be more defended against something than less. Though I do also understand RAID arrays can shorten life expectancy on some hard drives. Now what are you saying about a wanna be controller?

Not a bad build. But if you go C2Q I'd get an X48 based board or a P45 based board. Far better then anything piece of crap nVidia board especially when it comes to overclocking.

Plus DDR3 is highly overrated at the moment especially for the current Phenom II chips and the C2Q based chips. It just doesn't offer enough performance boost to justify the cost. Personally I'd stick with DDR2 and slap 8GB of 1066 or faster in there for under $100.

The Enermax 1050watt is a great power supply but you can get PSU's that are just as good for cheaper. Check out something like the Corsair 1000HX.

It's a ICHx intel solution it's software raid. Now the combination of the Window driver model and RAID 5 kinda gives the same feel as playing russian roulette with 5 bullets in the chamber. (You might want to invest in a UPS)