I've just got done building a system, so I'll make a couple comments:

I'd also say go with the Intel CPU, for one thing they run much cooler, and thus quieter, and the stock (retail box) cooling fans are fine with them.

I also agree with th ecomments above- don't bother witha sound card, most of the motherboard ones are fine.

RAID 10 is nice, too- While you need 4 160 GB drives to make 320 GB, they run throughput twice as much, and the setup is redundant.  I had one of the new drives fail after about 2 weeks, the replacement was painless, the system (I'm still running Win 2000) took care of moving all the data to the replacement drive, automatically.

My system came out to about $1500, with the 4 drives, Core 2 Duo E6600, 2 GB RAM (really all Windows can use), ATI X1950XT graphics card (good buy for $250, but it will NOT drive two monitors), 600 W power supply, no operating system, no monitors.

You still need a floopy to instal the RAID drivers, though...  ;-)