I have about 600 to spend on a motherboard cpu and ram. I have some sata and ide drives i need to put in it as well as an ocz powerstream 600 with a case i can use. I also have a geforce 250 to use for the vid. I was hoping for maybe 8 gigs or more of ram, phenom 2 for cpu, might buy aftermarket hsf to go with, unless recommendation here are better for the complementary motherboard to work well with each other. please let me know of any build you might have done and i can go price compare for stuff now. Trying to make the hd the only thing causing bottlenecking at this point, until i start doing my raids with more money and hds..