I am building a gaming PC for myself, my budget is around $1000. I have all the parts picked out, and I have checked for compatibility. I just need to know if I have overlooked any compatibility issues or if I am terribly deficient in any one area. Current specs are:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Motherboard: PC CHIPS P55G (V1.0)
Video Card: Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX
RAM: Two DDR2 2GB 533Mhz
Sound Card: Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme 7.1
Hard Drive: Seagate ST3100011A 100GB IDE 2MB CACHE Ultra ATA100 7200RPM 100Mb/s
Power Supply: Chiefmax 650W 20/24 Pin ATX Power Supply w/ PCI Express & Serial
Case: Chiefmax Chiefmax AF-2B Piano Black 11bay Side Window Gaming Mid-Tower Case Front USB 2.0 & Audio 0.5 secc steel midtower black ATX.
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium
DVD Drive: Lightscribe 20X DVD+-RW
CD Drive: Memorex Black 52X32X52 EIDE Internal CD-RW Drive
Ethernet Card: Belkin 10/100 Fast Ethernet Desktop PC
Wireless Card: Zonet ZEW MIMO
Monitor: SOYO 20in Wide screen LCD Monitor
CPU Fan: Cooler Master Socket 775 Heat Sink/Fan OR Basic CPU Fan (Aluminum Heatsink / 60mm Fan) (The second one comes free with the CPU, so if it's sufficient, tell me)
Case Fans: Two Glacialtech 80mm Case Fan

Here we go:

- I suggest you avoid PCChips. There are just too many better board manufacturers out there...don't hang your hat in their house.

- get DDR2-800 RAM. Check Frys.com for deals with rebates & if you're lucky, free shipping.

- sound card? why? save the money for something you really need like....

- an SATA HDD with either 8 or 16MB buffer...& get something bigger than 100GB!

- I won't comment much on the case as they are personal preference, but don't trust the power supply. 120mm cooling fans would be much better than 80mm too...they move a lot of air & they're generally quieter. Don't fans come with the case?

- CD burner? why? you have a DVD burner that can handle all the burning chores. Use the money elsewhere.

- ethernet card? doesn't the board have integrated LAN? Use the money elsewhere.

- no floppy drive?

- plenty of CPU coolers available HERE ...decide on how much you wanna spend, find something in that price range, then google up some reviews.You don't have to spend a lot, there's several for $20 or less.

Thanks for advice. A few more questions I would have if you are still looking at this post:

-Can you recommend a better motherboard?

-I read that RAM works better when it is matched to the processor's front side bus. For the core 2 quad, this is 1066 Mhz, which matches the 533 RAM. Correct me if I'm wrong about this.

Also, does anyone know if CPU core speed or number of cores is more important for a gaming PC? ex. is a 2.4 MHz/core 4 core CPU better than or worse than a 3.6 MHz single core CPU?

Yes you are correct for optimal perforamnce your ram and cpu fsb should always run nysc so DDR2 533 is the correct choice for a 1066 FSB CPU, unless your going to overclock it than you might want to go with DDR2 800 or higher depending upon how much you are going to overclock the CPU's FSB. Or if you decide to upgrade to a better cpu then you might want to go with DDR2 800 and underclock the ram down to DDR2 533 for now.

It depends on what you are doing. Most software out there can't take advantage of Quad Cores yet. If a game is threaded for 2 Cores and you have a 4 Core CPU than you will see zero perforamnce gain, because the game can't take advantage of the two extra cores. Same goes for a Single Core vs a Dual Core CPU.

The ghz race days are long gone. It's not soo much the ghz anymore, but the technology itself within the chip itself. A Core 2 Duo 6350 that runs @ 1.8ghz will beat any Pentuim 4 hands down at any speed even in single threaded mode, due to the technology within the Core 2 Duo's chip itself that makes it peform much better then the Pentuim 4's chip technology.

"I read that RAM works better when it is matched to the processor's front side bus"

I should have explained about why DDR2-800 would be a better choice but Cobra_R pretty much covered it.

Get DDR2-800 & manually configure the RAM settings in the BIOS to run it at DDR2-533. Then if you ever decide to overclock in the future, you'll be all set - at least up to 1600MHz FSB.

As for the motherboard, look for one based on the Intel P35 chipset. Asus & Gigabyte are two of the top brands but there are plenty of others. The PCChips board you picked is a cheapie - newegg has it for $35. It's a microATX board with just 2 RAM slots. Did you choose it because of the cost or is that what you wanted?

I choose based on cost. from what I've read, the motherboard doesn't much affect the performance of a computer, just limits all your other choices. I picked a motherboard that seemed inexpensive and compatible with the other parts I wanted to get. Correct me if any of m logic there is wrong

"from what I've read, the motherboard doesn't much affect the performance of a computer"

Where did you read that? That's somewhat true for AMD systems because AMD CPUs have the memory controller built into the CPU, not the motherboard, therefore performance is fairly similar from one board to another.

Intel CPUs still rely on the memory controller that's built into the motherboard chipset (northbridge). So if you get a board based on a crappy chipset, you'll have crappy performance. The nForce chipset that the PCChips board is based on isn't bad, but PCChips has a poor reputation. Right now, the Intel P35 chipset is probably the most popular northbridge, prior to that the P965 was the hot chip. But you also have to consider the southbridge. I think you need to do some more reading before you buy anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northb...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southb...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...

Changes:

Motherboard: Biostar P35D2-A7 ATX Motherboard
RAM: 2X DDR2 2GB 800Mhz
Hard Drive: Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200GB 7200rpm 9.3ms seek time
Case+Fans+PS: XION II XON-101 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811208005)
CPU Fan: Cooler Master X Dream 4
Removed the Ethernet card

Are these improvements enough? Currently I am most worried about the cooling system, followed by the PS