So any advice would help but this is what I thinking about putting together.

Asus Striker Extreme mother board
Intel E6850 processor
4 gigs of corsair xms 4-4-4-12
xfx 8800 ultra xxx edition
dual WD Raptor 10K rpm HD's

thats just some of the basics that i am interested in putting together.

Any advice would be cool

Thats quite a formidable set up. Save yourself some money, get a GTX. And dual raptors? Do you really need it? a single 500GB drive would suit your needs, not to mention give you larger HD space. And also don't get 4 gigs of ram unless you plan on using an OS that can take advantage of them. Otherwise looks like a solid set up. Get an Antec 900 gaming case. And if you plan to OC (which would be a very smart thing to do with this rig) then get a good HSF, a Thermalright Ultra 120 or Tuniq Tower 120 would be really good. With the money you saved from getting the GTX and the HDD's (and maybe the ram too) you could get a really nice monitor or save up for 9xxxx series nVIDIA cards.

What is your budget? It's difficult to recommend alternatives without knowing price constraints.

If you insist on an 8800 Ultra, get the MSI version which is available at $579 from newegg. Personally though I'd go for a stock 8800GTX and overclock it, as I don't believe the Ultra's performance increase is worth the extra $90.

As for other recommendations, I'd need an idea of how much you have to spend first.

Sharps right, as 4 gigs is overkill unless you use a 64 bit os. The GTX over the Ultra, no brainer

1- 4gigs is overkill unless u will use Windows 64bit ( xp pro/vista )
2- 1 raptor is enough for ur system and game files, and get another regular HDD like 300GB+ and save ur data (movies/pics/music ...etc) in it.
3- 8800 ultra??!!Hmm, follow foxrocks advice
4- personally, i never ever will get any single part for a computer not from ( evga - asus - bfg - intel - thermaltake - coolermaster ) specially the main parts like MB, GPU ...etc, as i experienced alot of failuire parts from MSI and GigaByte

and unless he knows how to partition his hard drives, that raptor will go to waste.

I completely disagree about the Ultra versus GTX. If it's in the budget, the Ultra is definitely worth the money. The cheapest GTX from Newegg is a 575 mhz CPU with 1800mhz memory. I would like to see you stabley overclock that GTX to Ultra levels (660 mhz CPU and 2300 memory for the MSI version). And, to make it even better, if you check around (especially on Newegg) it often comes with a free Company of Heroes, which in itself is a $40 value. If it's not in the budget though, the GTX is more than enough to run current games, but I would see a great improvement over the GTX even if you OC it. Personally, I wouldn't buy the Ultra unless it came with a free game that I wanted to play - Company of Heroes is excellent by the way. EVGA has a nice Ultra too for a bit less.

awesome thanks for all the help guys I am going to go with the 2 gigs of memory also I think I am going to go with the xfx 8800 ultra. I am either thinking about going with a themaltake Mozart tower but not sure yet still looking at options but money is not an issue i have about 4 grand to spend maybe more. So any more ideas would be grateful.

I use a Coolermaster Centurion 5 case. It is a great case - plenty of room for almost anything (5 optical drive bays, 4 hdd bays, ATX size). It also looks very professional while maintaining a nice air flow design. The thing that is best about it is the ease of building and maintanence. All the hard drives and optical drives lock into place with sliding rails rather than using screws - this is excellent for swaping out components, building the computer to begin with, and adding components. I highly recommend the case, and it isn't expensive. If you are looking for a gaming style body, I recommend the Thermaltake Kandalf VA9000BWS, although this tends toward the pricey side, but worth it if you have a large budget.

Money is no object? Okay.

Motheboard -- Asus Striker Extreme: $300

CPU -- Intel Q6600 or E6850: $375 (or go silly with a QX model)

RAM -- 4 GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR1066: $300

GPU -- MSI 8800Ultra x 2: $1190

HD1 -- WD Raptor X 150GB: $175

HD2 -- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB: $80 (larger if you need more storage)

PSU -- PCP&C Silencer 750 Quad: $200

Case/water cooling -- Thermaltake Kandalf VD4000BWS: $280

Display -- : BenQ FP241W $680

Speakers -- Logitech Z5500: $290

Keyboard -- Logitech G15: $70

Mouse -- Logitech G5 (2-button): $60

OS -- Vista Home Premium 64

Total: $4000 and I guess you could spend more on a QX CPU and 30" monitor if you wanted to go even more nuts. To bring it down to a more sensible level...

* Swap the motherboard for a Gigabyte P35-DS3R (save $170)
* Lose one of the 8800Ultras (save $595)
* Change the speakers for the slightly less beefy Z5300e (save $90)
* Swap the monitor for the not-quite-as-fantastic-but-still-great Dell Ultrasharp 2407WFP (save $130)

Total for the second, more sensible rig: $3015

Hey I say if you got the money, go for it. I love my 2 raptors! I can tell a huge difference over the standard larger 7200 rpm sata drives.

If you are intending to use your Raptors in RAID 0, I would advise that you don't. The accepted wisdom is that RAID 0 does not bring any real-world advantages for a desktop setup.

Raptors are the fastest IDE desktop drive you can buy, so that I would agree on.

I was going to get the Asus Striker Extreme, but changed my mind. You might want to do the same, seems ASUS is having serious quality control problems with this board.

Read the reviews (Many DOA's, RMA's, and problems with the board seeing more then 2gb of RAM)

Even ASUS's own forums on this board look pretty bad

Also, there are reports of the 680i chipset not accepting 4 sticks of ram on the boards...be careful