I just happened to see this thread, and I'd thought I throw in what I'm going to have in my new computer:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Dual Core CPU (a mouthfull, what!)
Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard
Shapphire X1950XT 256 Mb Graphics card
Seasonic S12 600W power supply
2 GB DDR-2 800 (PC2-6400) matched Cosair Memory DIMMs (2 x 1GB)
Quanity 4 Seagate 7200.10 160 GB SATA drives (they will be run as RAID 10, 320 GB actual size)
NEC AD-7170A DVD Writer
Coolermaster Centurian 5 case.

Total cost is just about $1,500, incidently, I'm carring over my 2 -21" Philips monitors (the card can drive dual monitors)

Some comments- see www.tomshardware.com for thoughts about Intel vs. AMD processors.  The Raid 10 is interleaved AND redundant, if one drive fails the pair fails, but all the data will still run from the other pair.  The motherboard supports it.  No more backups! This will be my first floppyless computer, and it will run through a KVM switch alongside my current Pentium 4- 3.2 GHZ computer, the one before that (an AMD 1.2 ) gets retired.

This is a fairly high-end system, incidently.  ;-)    The parts are just starting to show up, it isn't running yet.