Motherboard Suggestion

[Soulside]

a few things:
the intel 6450 will clock as high as the 6000, and run many applications faster. you will have to overclock it though, at stock it will not be as fast as the 6000. the closest to the 6000 will be the 6600 with a pretty good overclock, or the 6750 pretty mcuh stock will beat it. you are correct, anything above the 6450 costs more than the 6000. i would love to welcome another member into the AMD family, but you should consider the intels. if you already have, fine. go for the amd as the 6000 is a marvelous cpu in any event.

Yes, I think I'm going to go with the AMD (of course, this might change between now and when I'm ready to order). I simply find the Intel chips, superior though they might be, far more expensive than an excellent AMD chip that I'll most certainly be satisfied with.

you should get an 8600gts video card. it costs more, but it will be immensely better for gaming than that 8500gt. i guess that depends on how much gaming you do.

I don't do a lot of gaming, but I had another look around the site and thoroughly searched for the best deals and products and decided to go with an 8600GT after all.

i am not sure about this, but you may want another gb of ram (make sure you buy 2 x 512mb, or another 2gb set so you will keep it in dual channel). i think vista 64-bit is going to want more ram than 2gb. someone who has vista can tell you that for sure.

The general consensus seems to be that 2 GB is definitely sufficient for Vista; I've looked around other forums and asked people who personally own Vista.

the mobo you have picked out is an SLI mobo (two pcie 16 slots for two graphics cards). the psu you have selected will not power two cards, it only has one connector. if you aren't going to use SLI, its no big deal. but i would get a psu that supports it...if you come across another card for cheap SLI is awesome as long as you do not pay retail for the 2nd card.
i have the same hsf, and i love it. and its pretty.
those are my suggestions.

Again, took this one to heart and managed to find a GREAT deal on a PSU that supports SLI in case I ever want to get another video card.

Anyway, with all that said, here's what the current configuration looks like:

Case - X-DISCOVERY Black Steel ATX
Motherboard - Foxconn C51XEM2AA
Power Supply - GameXStream OCZ600GXSSLI ATX12V 600W
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor 3.0GHz (2 x 1MB L2 Cache)
Fan/Heatsink - ZALMAN CNPS9500 LED 92mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan + Heatsink
RAM - Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel
Hard Drive - Western Digital Caviar 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache
Video Card - MSI GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP
Optical Drive - Sony NEC Optiarc
Multi-Media/Card Reader - SIIG 2.0 Hi-Speed USB 52-in-1 Reader/Writer
Monitor - Hanns·G Black 19" 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor
Keyboard/Mouse - Microsoft Comfort USB Ergonomics Keyboard + Mouse
Speakers - Logitech X-230 32 Watts 2.1 Black Speakers
OS - Microsoft Windows Vista 64-Bit Home Premium for System Builders
Additional Software - Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007

The recalculated total, after all rebates and shipping have been applied, comes to $1411.57. Again, I'm still as open to suggestions as ever, but I feel a lot more confident about this build. Also, I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to kindly help me this far.

This is the most fun I've had on the internet for a while. =P