Building my 1st PC need help please.

Greetings

First posting at your incredibly active forum.

I am in definite need of recommendations.

Building my first system and going crazy especially with Motherboard choices. Seen so many reviews my eyes are crossing. The big fears are actually my choice of all the components.

The system is mainly built for Photoshop CS3 and Premiere pro. I am aware that with Premiere the system configuration possibilities can go over the top for professionals, but my requirements would be so that for a 4GB avi file I don’t have to wait 24 hrs for the rendering; as well, a little bit of gaming of the Tomb Raider type is contemplated. (devoted fan of Lara Croft here).

System Description

Case: Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 ATX Tower (with appropriate cooling fans)

PSU Thermaltake ToughPower Cable Management 750 Watt ( or should I go to 850 watts ?)

Motherboard ASUS P5K Deluxe ( Major indecision here with graphic cards supposedly
covering up PCI slots etc..)

CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
CPU Cooler Zalman CNPS8700 LED Copper Heat Pipe.

Memory (2) 4GB kit (2GBx2), 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-6400 (thinking of maxing board and running Win XP Pro at 64 bit on one partition and 32 bit on another partition just in case drivers problems).

Graphics Card PNY VCQFX1400-PCIE-PB Quadro FX1400 .

Hard Drives (2) Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB Hard Drive - WD5000KSRTL
and a few more older ATA drives.

Optical Drives (2) Sony 20x Multi-Format DVD+ -RW Burner, Internal.

Floppy Drive Anything will do.

OS Windows Vista Pro ( Seen a lot of poor reviews about it but hopefully future Service Packs will remedy)

So, I would appreciate any constructive critique and or opinions on anything that may occur you, overkills, anything!.

Thank you.

Sergio

g-paw

No overclocking, have not seen ntel Core 2 Quad Q6600 that include HSF.
Excellent call on the smaller drive and WiFi.

Thanks

Right again on CPU g-paw. located outside outside rochester ny in cow landia. No problem getting parts. That motherboard business is baffling, any suggestion ? not much of a gamer but still would like a good board ; is it that the market better boards are geared toward gamers?

If you need onboard firewire, e.g., for a digital camcorder, the ASUS would be could and if you don't the Gigabyte. For mobo the cost largely comes down to features, how well they overclock, and various RAID configurations. Unless you need a professional video card, an 8600GT should work. Higher end video cards are really for gaming rather than photo and video editing/rendering, which again are CPU intensive
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g-paw

Thanks for suggestions, still comparing motherboards and graphic cards and yes it seems Photo and Video editing I just found out seem to be and memory and cpu intensive. Thanks again.