Hey Bread,
Ya have a good rig so far man. A couple of things you need to think about:
1) 5 years in the computer world is nearly unrealistic, make sure that no matter what parts you get you may have problems 5 months down the line or never. It's a game of luck.
2)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188013&Tpk=680i%2bA1 is a much better board. More stable and for the type of processor your going for it will do a better job.
3) Leet hit it dead on get a Q6600 or Q6700. Unless you want to waste money just skip the extreme editions.
4) Best Power Supply period. Good Job.
5) Again Leet hit it dead on. Unless you overclock don't get dominators. Dominators tend to run extremely hot before overclocking. The name of the name is cooling, the cooler the better. Leet has good RAM linked. The Funk has taken the words out of my mouth. Crucial Ballistix memory is some of the best memory and it will take advantage of the 680i chipset better then the Corsair would. Again unless you get Ultimate x64 or even XP Pro 64Bit edition ( NOT A TRUE 64BIT OPERATING SYSTEM JUST HANDLES 4 GB OF RAM EFFICIENTLY) 4GB of Ram is useless the highest you'll be able to go is 3.25GB.
6) Don't raid if you will be depending on this computer especially for school. While RAID 0 (Striping) is great for performance and RAID 1 (Mirroring) is great for disaster recovery, what I would do is get a Raptor X (150GB) for your boot and programs, and a nicely sized hard drive to store all your crap on. I have a Raptor X that has Vista installed, a Regular Raptor that has XP installed, then a 400GB Seagate 7200RPM Hard drive for my files which can be accessed on both OS's.
7) Which aquagate? If it is the S1 or something like that you'll actually get lower temps by running standard air cooling. I have personal experience (not in my rig but a replacement LCS for my buddy's peice of shit prebuilt) which the temperatures went up from the replacement. Air cooling should do you just fine unless you are overclocking. The Zalman CNPS 9500LED (
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118223) is one of the best silent coolers out there right now. It lowered my temps 15 degrees (C ) with artic silver 5. Oh yea get Artic Silver 5 for your thermal paste. Air cooling will be a lot easier to maintain over time as well. I am not a big fan of LCS because of the routine maintenance and plus liquid + electronics=recipe for losing a ton of money.
XFX, eVGA, and BFG are usually the top three brands to go with with an GeForce Graphics card. They ALL have lifetime warranties. I would probably go with XFX they have a double lifetime warranty so if you wind up selling it to a friend or giving it to a friend something like that it will be covered for them as well. Also just a technicality ASUS has been making the reference boards for the 8XXX series of cards for nVidia which gives it slight performance enhancements over a comparable card from XFX, eVga, or BFG. I would still go with an 8800GTX, if you SLI you are now looking at two possible parts that can fail, however, Fraggle does bring up a very good point about those new nVidia cards.
9) I have four SATA DVD Burners, and I can tell you my case looks so much better without IDE, but not only that they are so much faster then IDE.
10) Don' waste your money on that LAN card. You won't see a difference unless you get on a T1 or higher connection. Even then just being on a t1 or higher is going to make the bigger difference.
Sorry it was such a lengthy post, however, you did a real good job putting together your first custom computer. Welcome to the world of custom builders.
Snyper
(P.S. I don't want to get into now, however, I have had no issues with my SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Music and Ultimate x64 at all.)
