New Build slightly overwhelmed, please advise on parts list.

Hi,

The last home built I put together a few systems 3-4 years ago and while they worked, compatability was an issue. My last system was a lower end hp that I slapped some extra ram and a video card in and it worked but is pretty much maxed out.

For the work I do I'm running several instances of a program and need lots of ram and video texture.

In general what I want is a new box that has E6300 mildly OC'ed. 4 gigs of ram and middle of the road 512 meg video card, such as the Nvidia 7600 GS.

I'd like to keep the price around $1000 maybe sightly more if a significant proformance / stability issue can be addressed.

Heres the list so far: (all with shipping added)

case : XION II XON-103 Black SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450W Power Supply $76
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM $64
Memory: CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 675 (PC2 5400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail ~ $400 for 4gig
MB: GIGABYTE GA-965P-S3 Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 Express $122
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe 1.86GHz 2M sharing L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor $180
video: eVGA 512-P2-N548-TX GeForce 7600GS 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card $136

Thanks for any insights you care to share, I'm planning day after thanksgiving.

ps. If I got an extra hard drive could I do software raid0 in WinXP like under linux or do I need raid chip on motherboard?

CompRookie, The suggestion to run with a GT is a good one, however, the amount of texture memory used > 256 Meg, which is causing the card to swap memory, so I have to have 512 ram on the video card, which would be the eVga Geforce 7950GT for $250. For the extra $100 I'd be more tempted to try getting an extra hard drive and load up raid 0 for faster disk access.

Same problem with ram. Most of the time I'm running between 0-100 meg free on a 2 gig system.