Newegg.com - EVGA P55 LE 123-LF-E653-KR LGA1156 Intel P55 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards

Newegg.com - Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor - Processors - Desktops

Newegg.com - G.SKILL Trident 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000) Desktop Memory Model F3-16000CL9D-4GBTD - Desktop Memory

Its going in a real nice Lian Li with a Thermal Take Tough Power 750 watt psu and an eVga gtx275. This is my gaming pc that I find myself spending the most time on as of late. Windows 7 forced the upgrade thanks to bickering between Nvidia and the crappy nforce4 chipset and Creative (Xfi). If the Xfi refuses to work again it would have been my last Creative purchase.

My thoughts:

Ram - I do not have any experience with GSkill but a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. Hopefully this clocks to their 2000+ rating relatively easily out of the box as I am not an overclocker.

Mobo - I am not enamored at the chipset as people seemingly have some of the same complaints that I have concerning my current nforce4 chipset, that is, issues arising when occupying the 2nd memory channel. All in all I could care less about the motherboards lack of true pcie 16x3 or 4 as I will not run sli again let alone tri, quad sli or physx. In hindsight pc gaming is a dead horse that even developers don't want to push to hard. As long as my rig is better than mainstream oem "gaming" machines I am good to go.

CPU - Its an i5 what more needs to be said. Imo the large price increase to an i7 would not warrant its performance outside of Sli/pcie performance.

Obviously I love to entertain your opinions and expertise. I am far from perfect or all knowing. I find myself at the crossroads once again in regards to pc gaming. Even this frugal $500.00 upgrade hardly seems worth it considering 2 laptops and another very productive (when working) desktop in the home. Maybe someone will recommend a Xbox or PS3