I got a job as a PC Tech at the university and i have a stable income so now its time to spend it!

All items below are from the 'Egg.

Phenom 9600 BE - $150

ASUS M3A78-CM - $80

4x2GB 1066 from G.Skill - $210

And the last thing to be purchased as i know the price will drop,

9800 GTX+ - $200
----------------------------------------
Total $650~

Any objections and/or suggestions are appreciated and will be considered if accompanied by solid reasoning/ experience.
Thanks dudes!

Drop to 4GB of good DDR2-800, unless you need the 8GB. Good DDR2-800 should overclock to DDR2-1066 anyway, but the overall difference in speed is minor.

Consider the GTX260? It's only $55 more, before MIR. It should give a decent gaming boost.

im switching to vista x64 when im finished with this build and i will start audio work along with Autocad stuff so i figure "what the heck"!

About the video card. $250 is a bunch of money and i don't know if the price will drop anymore. If its closer to $200 by the time i buy the graphics card, i definitely pick that up.

Get an xx50 Phenom, or even better, a C2D based CPU.

Drop to 4GBs of DDR2-800MHz

Get the 4850 for $170. 9800GTX/GTX+/GTX260 aren't worth it.

^Reasoning or experience?
Here is a reason against the 4850, slower (not by much) than 9800 in Crysis and the cooler is junk.

Also, the e-Penis 3dmark scores have a slight effect on my decisions. No idea why but keep that in mind.

The phenom 9600 seems to be at an untouchable price point so I wouldn't downgrade to an equally priced XX50 Phenom. The 9850 is something to think about at ~$195 but seems out of your price target. The 4850 and 4870 are king of their price points, but sales and special deals can give Nvidia products an edge in price to performance, but keep in mind it goes the other way as well. Newegg has a 4870 for $235 after rebate (of $20) and coupon code, just something to think about.

my checks at the end of the week are a little over $200 so i would like to keep each part in that range. im going to research the 4870 a little more and update.

Oh, I was under the assumption you were dead-set on keeping NVIDIA as your video card. Please do research on the HD4870, it's a very good video card. Crysis is just one game that tends to favor NVIDIA.

i looked and i think the 260 is a better deal. yes the 4870 wins by a few frames, but both max out all the games that are tested, minus crysis. I looked at the specs of both cards and i think the 260 has much more potential and longetivity. the green corner has 112 GB/s of bandwidth while the red dude has 68.8 and thats overclocked. green almost doubles the reds texture fillrate and has a 5 Gpixel lead. i know that memory bandwidth isn't the bottleneck now, but someday it might be, and the 260 will start to show an advantage. not to mention the amount of memory is insane.

that is what i consider reasoning.

Citations
260-- http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php? [...] &Itemid=40

4870 -- http://www.overclockersclub.com/re [...] 870_oc.htm

Except that the 4870 is running gddr5 memory instead of 3, and the 4870 has a bandwidth of 115.2 GB/s which edges out the 260.

The number you used (68) is for the 4850.

OHHH! my bad. See, thats why i use citations.
this one is "more correct".
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341

Does any body have stats on either card when overclocked?

I don't have anything solid, but I think even with overclocking the two cards stay pretty much even.

The 260 will probably overclock higher, but the 4870 doesn't have to clock as high since the gddr5 memory can benefit from smaller clock increases. Bumping the memory clock up 100 to 1k would actually yield in a 400mhz data rate increase for example (and I've seen some people with good cards get up to 1250).

The moral of the story though is - both cards are good, and are pretty much equal in most cases, so just get whichever you can get the best deal on.

^ok.
and this is a quote that i was looking for in regards to 'experience'.
from [H]

"I had hd 4870, I tried overclocking with amd gpu tool and I was able to get 850, but after that the nightmare started happening, the card worked fine for 2 days at 850 and than I would get stuck pixels even in 2d, and artifacts in 3d, and than tried downclocking to 840/830/820 and no go, it actually used to pass atitool at 830 with 35% fan speed, it was not even stable in games at 810, and it would be stable at 790 though and anything higher I just could not get.

the sad part is while it was stable at 790 but it still gave me artifacts in atitool after a few mins, so I really dont recommend overclocking hd 4870 past 790-800

and no it does not fly by the gtx 280 at 790(total bull), only time it matches up is when you turn on 8xAA and in few games it is faster period.

my card only got slightly faster with 790 core clock and I would gain about 3fps on average in games.

the reason is simple, Nvidia cards benefit more from overclock than ati cards do, why? because you are raising the shader clock 2+mhz for each mhz on the core clock and that is why if you want to overclock nvidia card is the best way to go, because those shaders scream in games.

I returned my hd 4870 and got the gtx 280 now and it is really a great card, I got mine running at 692/1400/1250, my card is not the best overclocker but it is pretty damn fast, the shaders wont go any higher and I have to set the fan speed higher than auto in games, and I turn it down after I start gaming."

-HKD

i just found another crysis bench that i like. it shows FPS in different parts of the game.
not english though.
http://www.egielda.com.pl/?str=art&id=4400-20

and anything on that motherboard/cpu? i want to try for 3Ghz but i know that probably won't happen. 2.7 is good.