Finally a New Build some questions/recomm.

First off, as a new member I would just like to greet the [H] community, hope everyones holidays went well.

The build im using currently I built five years ago and im extremely overdue for a new one, but only up until about a month ago I've been put into a position to be able to do it. On christmas I got a Acer x223w 22'' LCD (1680x1050) which has completely motivated me to finally upgrade from my current dinosaur of a PC.

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Will primarily be used for gaming. My goal is to be able to play most games at max settings with my resolution.

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
Around $900.00, give or take if I need to. Shipping/Tax included.

3) Where do you live?
Myrtle Beach, SC

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. Please be very specific.
Everything except for a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, and headphones.

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Only reusing whats listed in question #4.

6) Will you be overclocking?
I plan on overclocking only the processor.

7) What size monitor do you have or plan to have?
22'' LCD 1680x1050

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
Plan on buying this weekend, building as soon as all the components arrive. I have been wanting to do this for a very long time, growing pretty impatient haha.

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc.
Don't plan on going SLI. Just decent for overclocking.

Over the past week of research this is the build I have put together.

CPU - Q6600 $189.99 @ newegg.com w/Free shipping

Mobo - GIGA-BYTE S-series GA-EP43-DS3L $84.99 @ buy.com w/Free shipping

RAM - G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 $39.99 @ newegg.com w/Free shipping

HD - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB $74.99 @ newegg.com w/Free shipping.

Video Card - EVGA 896-P3-1265-AR GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 $249.99 @ newegg.com w/Free Shipping

PSU - BFG Tech LS-680 680W PSU $78.24 @ buy.com w/Free shipping

Case - COOLER MASTER RC-690 $89.99 @ newegg.com

CPU Cooler - XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 $36.99 @ newegg.com
Retention Bracket ACK-I7751 $8.49 @ newegg.com w/Free shipping

Thermal Compound - Tuniq TX-2 $3.79 @ newegg.com

OS - Vista Home Premium 64-bit OEM $99.99 @ Newegg w/Free shipping

Total: 987.03 (Shipping included)

A couple other questions I had were:

Is the GTX 260 I have listed worth buying this weekend? Or would the prices drop enough to be worth waiting for when the 285/295 are released?

Are there any cases recommended that have easy access behind the motherboard tray for routing cables without having to drill out holes? I dont really like the idea of drilling into a brand new case I dropped X amount of dollars for.

And finally, if there are no options to my last question, is this worth it for cable sleeving?: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16899109002

I appreciate any recommendations and thank you for your time.

Happy New Year man. Hehe. Pretty solid build you got there. I see that you have been reading up on the parts. To save a few bucks more, consider the Coolermaster Centurion 590 RC for $49.76 at Provantage.com As far as the sleeving, I don't think you will need it to route the cables nicely in the case.

I forgot to mention also, If you want to stick with the CoolerMaster RC-690 case, look at purchasing it from Provantage.com for $56.40

Thanks for the reply. I do like the RC-690 and buying from Provantage will save me about 15 bucks, better then nothing haha. I have only ordered from Newegg before, how fast is shipping from buy.com and provantage?

Regarding the BFG Tech LS-680, think the cables are long enough to route behind the mobo tray and reach everything? If not im sure I can still route them for good airflow, but the former would be a plus.

And one more question is holding me back from making the purchase, I know my post was long so it may have been easy to miss. Would you buy the GTX 260 now, or wait a couple weeks to see if the prices drop. If the price drop isn't much then im willing to just buy it now, guess thats kinda hard to predict though.

It's tough to predict.. sure the GTX260 may fall a few $$$ but you'll probably wind up spending more on the case and power supply once those discounts expire. You could hedge your bets and just buy things from your list as they go on sale but what fun is that?

Yeah that makes sense, waaaay to impatient right now to do that lol. Just itching to build this, will be a beast compared to what im running now.

Be sure to post some pics when you're done... always like seeing shiny new rigs

Yeah for sure man, thanks for the input.

That build looks good but as this is mainly a gaming rig(by the build queries you answered) you may be better off with a different c2d like the
Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Wolfdale 2.53GHz $119.99 + free shipping or
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache $164.99 + free shipping You have selected an solid cpu cooler and both of the aboce cpu's oc like crazy(I have seen many of those 7200's get close to 4 gig!) Not to mention saving you some $ just somthing to consider. But, if im not mistaken you need to get the G0 stepping version of the 6600 for the quad to be better than the standard C2D for gaming?

Not true. Beyond a 1280x1024 resolution, the video card starts to play more of a role in gaming than the processor. In most cases, the Q6600 and the E8400 produce similar effects. However, more games are starting to become "optimized" for use with quad-cores -- with Left 4 Dead being the latest example -- so unless the OP really wants to save some money, the Q6600 is still a good choice.

The G0 revision lowers the amount of voltage that the Q6600 needed, which made it a better overclocking version than the B3 revision. But regardless of revision, most Q6600s are capable of reaching around 3GHz, if not higher.

Yeah I looked into the E8400, but I'm building this rig to last some time so I went with the Q6600. Everything is ordered, waiting on shipping. Thanks for your replies.

Don't forget to post pics!