case consideration
I just put together a Pentium D 820 system for doing video (can't afford a dual processor PowerMac yet) and picked up a CoolerMaster Centurion case. It is completely screwless, including the harddrives and DVD slots.
I went without a floppy but if your using SATA HDD's you probably will need to have one for the drivers. You may be able to use the Mainboard's driver disk if the SATA drivers are unpacked on it but I've seen it where you need to run an executable to create the floppy for the drivers. I also went with a ASUS board and its fantastic. I wanted the Athlon X2 but accidentally won an eBay auction for the Pentium D 820 retail boxed for $179 and picked up the motherboard for $65. The difference in price for the difference in performance made it unattractive to go AMD. Also the Intel is supposed to be faster for video encoding (but not games, which are really more dependent on the video card anyway). Since your going with the Nvidia 6600, the few frames per second faster the AMD is over the Intel shouldn't make that much difference.
I bought most of the components on newegg.com, they are usually the cheapest and ship fast. Check them out before you swip your card somewhere else, I saw in your build list a few prices that I know are cheaper at newegg.
In the back of my mind I wanted to put a system together that may be able to run OSX-X86 in the future without having to purchase anything new, so going with the Intel chip might allow me to do that.
-db
I just put together a Pentium D 820 system for doing video (can't afford a dual processor PowerMac yet) and picked up a CoolerMaster Centurion case. It is completely screwless, including the harddrives and DVD slots.
I went without a floppy but if your using SATA HDD's you probably will need to have one for the drivers. You may be able to use the Mainboard's driver disk if the SATA drivers are unpacked on it but I've seen it where you need to run an executable to create the floppy for the drivers. I also went with a ASUS board and its fantastic. I wanted the Athlon X2 but accidentally won an eBay auction for the Pentium D 820 retail boxed for $179 and picked up the motherboard for $65. The difference in price for the difference in performance made it unattractive to go AMD. Also the Intel is supposed to be faster for video encoding (but not games, which are really more dependent on the video card anyway). Since your going with the Nvidia 6600, the few frames per second faster the AMD is over the Intel shouldn't make that much difference.
I bought most of the components on newegg.com, they are usually the cheapest and ship fast. Check them out before you swip your card somewhere else, I saw in your build list a few prices that I know are cheaper at newegg.
In the back of my mind I wanted to put a system together that may be able to run OSX-X86 in the future without having to purchase anything new, so going with the Intel chip might allow me to do that.
-db
I decided to go with the Antec Sonata II case... I like the idea of the thing being quiet and it doesn't look quite as gaudy as some of the other cases out there. As for the floppy, it most certainly is necessary to install RAID drivers. I'd recommend taking a look at extremetech.com ... that's where I usually go for pc advice. I heard a few rumors a while back that it was possible to install RAID drivers with one of those USB key chain drives but I haven't tried it myself. You don't have a spare floppy drive lying around? I'm going to steal one from an older computer, use it to install the drivers, and pull it out right away.