Dont waste your money on raptors, when i started to look into high end rigs i thought the same as you, go for the fastest HDD. In reality its way cheaper to go with some 320, 500 or 750 GB HD's and put them in RAID 0. I would suggest two Western digital Hardrive 160-320GB in Raid 0 and a 750BG for Data, will give you the same performance as a raptor for half the price and you get like 3 times the capacity. Another thought, some people will support me on this, others wont, you could just go with a Q6600 G0 stepping and oc it to 3.8ghz and save the 800$.......As well, scratch the 8800 GTX, i have never seen or heard of that particular brand, go with a 8800 Ultra. EVGA has them for 599$ at a few places.