Bleh, not really in a position to wait six months. Anything stupid here? Whenever grant money comes in, I'm thinkin that this is along the lines of what I'll pick up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115070 2600k
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131702 long warranty mobo
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233184 (two of these for 16GB)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136803 (thinking about two of these for RAID)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145493 (storage)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130655 GTX 580
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817153131 (last time I bought a PSU, 500 watts was super duper high end and CPUs were 120nm process)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811133192 (99% won't get this because of the price but my room is next to the laundry and there's a stupid amount of dust and lint that floats in. Filters are very appealing to me.)

I'll nab an OEM copy of Win7 64bit and cannibalize an optical drive from somewhere. Come January, I'll pick up a pair of 24" Ultrasharps and put them on the DVIs and HDMI to my current 24". It'll go on the left for start menu and icons while the other two are for productivity software on the center and right.

Would a 6970 be a better deal? It's loads cheaper for 10-20% less performance. While that wouldn't be much of a deal now, would the 580 be worth buying for say three or four years from now? You say PCI 3.0 is coming so I'm wondering if the increase in bandwidth will leave what's here now in the dust. Not like I could cheaply upgrade a few components when the time comes though.

Also, whatever happened to Creative's stranglehold on the sound card market? Did the switch to digital output kill them off or something? The buzz from onboard sound always bugged the hell out of me when I had my last desktop. Is that a problem anymore?