New Computer (pics included)

The thermal paste is already applied on the bottom of the heatsink from the factory.

Antistatic wristband.

Omg!
Your missing a Sound Card!
Thats like the most important component aside from the GPU!
for me at least!    

unless u can survive with on board sound which I cant!

now back to the topic..

Yea the Thermal past is already factory laid at the bottom of the heat sink

Yes take a anti static wristband with you OR tie your arm to the ground with a Metal Wire..(Not recommended)     but still can work  

hopefully your building it on a table and not the floor. Yes a static wrist band is probably the safest way to go, but as long as you touch inside of the case with you hand before you start install anything you should be fine.

Get off the carpet

Carpet + dry air = static electricity

I would suggest you install the CPU and HSF onto the motherboard before you put the motherboard,itself, into the case just to be sure the HSF is on securely.
Their push down lock mechanism are known to fool you into thinking its locked in when you can't push it down any further and start to think that you might break your mobo if you do. So just preinstall the CPU HSF and check the back of the mobo to see if its securely locked in place. GL

good information guys - Thanks a lot. Any more would be great!

Also, I do not plan on installing it on the carpet, haha.

'Ground' seems to be one of the most misunderstood terms on this forum. If your pc frame is not grounded to a known good building ground, then no matter what surface you build on you will be dealing with a 'floating ground'. So you and the frame are in a very dry atmosphere, you equalize your potentials (say with a wrist strap), but your case is +50kv DC... Now you take your MB out of its antistatic bag... (it should be at 0VDC potential, if the factory did its job.) You handle it carefully, by the edges, try to line up the standoffs to the holes in the MB, but miss by a little bit and snag one of the NB's exposed +5vdc legs on the standoff... OOOps... Your NB has just taken a 50kv surge. It will probably work, for a while, some of the gates will only be a bit degraded...

So I'd recommend a proper static mat. But they are not cheap, and the average user of personal PC's will likely use it once every few years.

Next best choice, get a DIY power plug, only put one wire in it (from the bldg gnd, the third hole / prong...) On the other end of that wire install an alligator clip. (why don't we call them croc clips here in AUS?) Plug your DIY plug into an outlet, clip it to your case, then clip your wrist strap somewhere convenient to the case. Now your case is no longer floating, neither are you, and you didn't waste a lot of money. In fact, you'll probably find other uses for all of those bits before you do your next build, then back off to your local DSE to do it all over again.

Is this over-kill advice? Probably, but how much did that MB cost? CPU? GPU?

But hey, its your money.

Response in regard to SteelZ post above:
Most people would do better by investing in better headphones or speakers than a sound card... I run my sound off of a relatively sad integrated Realtek chipset, but I will guarantee you that it sounds better than a lot of people's sound systems that include soundcards... because I have it hooked up to a moderately high end receiver and speakers. I already had the equipment for my home theater system so its not like I spent all that money to make my computer sound good.

-mcg

Just like other said about the thermal grease, it should already be on the bottom of the retail HS:



Since I never used my E4400 retail HS, I decided to take a pic of my... paper weight.  

you should test POST first before you put ur motherboard in the case and screw everything in just in case something isn't working. POST requires cpu, ram, power supply and video card hooked up to monitor. go into bios and play around in there if you want, but if it starts up then great. if it doesn't then you jsut saved yourself alot of screwing in and unscrewing. have fun!

Make sure that if you set up the computer outside of the case that you don't put the motherboard on an electrically conductive surface. It'll short the whole bottom of the motherboard and probably toast it when you try to power up.

-mcg