man i dont want to be a downer, but you are building a beast for the wrong reasons. This gear WILL be obsolete in 5 years for the following reasons:
- DX11 will be out
- DDR2 RAM will be so rare, it'll be too expensive to get enough in your machine
- CPU micro-architectures will have progressed so far that your Core 2's will look ancient
- you will not be able to buy big enough hard drives in SATA II form factor, as a new protocol will have taken the lead.
History shows that building a mid-range system every 2 years or so give the best bang-for-buck. If you had built a "beast" 5 years ago, it would have looked something like:
- P4 2.5 GHz
- GeForce 4 4600
- 1GB DDR1-333Mhz
- maybe JUST a USB2 capable mobo
not very exciting eh?
For gaming, 8 cores are just a joke. No current game will have any performance improvement between 2 and 8 cores. How long do you want to wait before the other 6 cores actually play a role? Better to stick with what works here and now and make a $$$ saving of ~80%.
For HTPC, 8 cores and 16GB is OMFG-WTF-so-far-over-the-top-it's-rediculous arangement! Just how much power does it take to run a (worst case) 1080p PVR? Certainly not that much.
Good reasons to build a beast would include:
- you actually run apps that require it i.e. HD video NLE, 3d rendering etc.
- it's going to be a busy server
- you want braging rights
Each to their own however....Good luck if you decide to follow it through.