EVGA motherboard + AMD Phenom 9600 Quad @ 2.3Ghz - $200
4GB Corsair PC6400 RAM - $55
600W Corsair PSU - $100
EVGA nVidia GeForce 9800GTX+ 512MB - $175
WD 500GB HDD - $55
Lian-Li mid-ATX tower w/fans - $110
Total - $695
id say to go with 6-12 gigs of ram…of course ram is like the most costly but most needed…
No Prob.
EVGA is a great manufacturer if you do not intend to run your system overclocked for years. However, i think they are overpriced. You basically get the same stuff from Gigabyte or ASUS, you just pay for the name… They all have their advantages and disadvantages… The best mainboards IMO are Tyan boards… ^^ But those are for servers. I mostly had Gigabyte and ASUS boards. I liked both brands, never had any problem or any malfunction.
I also had ASRock, cheapass boards for HTPC, not bad either.
I also had ABit, which is closed now and gets bought by ASUS, just had problems with their boards. had to send it in 2 times.
Also the DFI boards are quite good, but rather expensive.
However i would not bargain on the mainboard. Go for a brand that has good capacitators and voltage transformers.
And the rest is a matter of your needs, what chipset you prefere, how many PCIe slots, SLI, xFire, how much ram should be supported, how many SATA, raid?
My last board was rather easy to find… in the german area we have http://www.geizhals.at or http://www.geizhals.de (which are different sites!)
There you can very easy search hardware and as results they show the vendors which have them, sorted by price along with a rating of the vendor regarding service, deliverytime and so on.
My last board was easy found. i choose in the filter what i wanted on the board, and there was only one that met all my needs 
Either you are up to it on your own to search or you tell me the specs you want and i search there the possible options you have.
But its rather “international” Hardware>Mainboars> choose sockets.
and the filter is multilanguage 
Well and i´ve never ever heared of Uberclocked
But it may be this way because in Austria/Germany this brand sounds very ridiculous.
Uber for those who dont know is from the german word “Über” which means in this context, “far above others” or “superiour”
However the brand sounds like “we sell common stuff just with fancy colors and leds for more money than others”
I’ve never had an EVGA motherboard, but I’ve had several EVGA GPU’s, and they’ve all been great.
Also, lifetime warranty.
I recommend a good motherboard. The more expensive the better. Preferably Asus.
I had a dual core amd cpu and a very cheap motherboard. My computer crawled to do the simplest tasks, like opening firefox.
I strongly recommend vista 64. I know people talk like it’s the slowest thing ever but the truth is when you have good specifications like good cpu, gpu and lots of ram. You will have a big smile when you render something with the 64 bit version of blender. It’s very fast.
WEll, i went ahead and got the setup LIGHTspeed suggested, the Asus motheroard was a lot cheaper that the EVGA, but I did get an EVGA videocard.
I Also got thisreally cool lightup case for it all, everything should fit in there.
It sould all be here in a few days, like, the day after Christmas I think.
Thanks for everyones help, I really appreciate it.
-Lahara
Cool. That’s a nice Christmas present, eh?
Did you get the 9800 GTX or 9800 GTX+? It doesn’t matter either way… I’m just curious!
Y’all have a nice Christmas now, hear?
-LIGHTspeed
Oh I just got the regular ol’ GTX 9800.
Next (after I get an OS), I’m going to buy a $2,000 car, probably a Honda or Toyota, I’ll make a thread about that when the time comes though, lol.
-Jimmy
Cool.
Right now I’ve got a junky old Nvidia 6200 integrated. I can’t wait for mid January, when I’ll have the “cache” for my new build!