Hey there,
For the record, I went with the amd 4000+ san diego, and a foxcon mobo. The foxcon is lower-end I know, but it has sata, raid, 4 pci slots and one pci express 16. No video so I went with a $40 pci-e 16 msi card. quite an improvement over my previous onboard video. I bought a thermaltake 430w ps that had 9 sata/ata connectors, an $8 asus cpu fan, a samsung 400gb sata drive, a full tower coolmax case and a 1gb strip of 3dfuzion ram. The absolute coolest thing I got though was a kingwin mobile rack case. This is a 5,25 internal mounted sleeve that allows you to quickly mount additional hard drives. I have 3 or 4 extra ~200gb drives that have been rotation in and out of an external usb encloser and that got old quick. The rack case allows me to just mount the drives into the sleve and all I have to do is power down and swap. I bought 3 extra sleves for about $10 each. This concept is very similar to the way a drive mounts in a alesis hd24 if anyone is familiar with that. Great for organizing files from drive to drive. I also purchased a fresh copy of xp home for $89 that includes a free upgrade to vista.
Obviously this is a systemn of compromise, but performance wise it is a huge upgrade over my amd 2600 machine and I am very pleased. I used an existing 160gb drive for my main drive my 2 existing dvd drives, a slightly aged 20" compaq crt monitor (for now) and a 3.5 internal card reader. I dropped about $600. I have noticed a major difference in large flac projects and the time it takes to defrag drives. My original goal of being able to mix 24 tracks is now a breeze and the render time to go from mix to two track is about cut in half... let alone the time I'm saving by having a large internal drive for projects that are in-cue and being able to easily insert my archive drives.
Thanks to all that helped!!!
Matt