Its like 3 A.M.. anyways there's got to be someone on.  
 
Hardcore gamer: games, games, games as in no video editing/encoding, converting, photo shop and whatnot
 
These are the two procs within my budget E8500: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819115037 & Q6700: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819115027 from what I understand both have good OC but the E8500 performs better in games right?
 
Video cards: right now I got 2x 8800GT and am upgrading from an AMD to intel to see if the performance difference satisfies my current demands for performance. if not, oh well I don't need help in this category
 
Mobo: I think i want a 3-way SLI capable of handling the upcoming 45nm quads
 
case & PSU: Already got them no help needed here
 
memory: haven't got to research this yet. does the memory speed have to match the FSB at all or just meet the standards of the board?
 
 
 

The E8500 has better performance in games and you should get a xigmatech or thermalright cooler to go with it. Also from the sounds of it you need a 750i or 780i motherboard both have tri sli but 750i instead of 16x16x16 it has 16x8x8 on its slots which doesnt make too much of a difference

Quads are becomming more and more a great choice for games lately.  While there are only a few games today that can take advantage of a quad (as in, the game itself uses all 4 cores), there are other advantages such as offloading Windows and other apps to the extra cores opening up the other two for your game.
 
So since more and more games will be supporting quad-core processors, it might be to your bennefit to get one and simply overclock it to the dual-core speeds and beyond.  I will concede however that my dual-core E6600 gets excellent framerates with my 9800GTX in Crysis, 2xAA, 16xAF, all settings on High, 1280x1024 (yea not a big rez) and I can probably go to 4xAA without a problem.  Oh and I'm running XP.  Unless you're going to be using a larger resolution, I'd stay with a dual-core if you're on a tighter budget.  If not, I'd go with a good quad-core and OC to 3GHz+ with a good aftermarket cooler and enjoy the show

I decided on the wolfdale and a 780i series mobo. The deciding factor could very well may be if I decide to keep the DDR2 800 RAM I'm using as of right now. Here is the selection I have to choose from on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] e+780i+SLI
 
At a glance I really like the evga board because it supports both all three PCI-e 2.0 lanes and DDR2 800. Are there any benificial performance gains upgrading from DDR2 800 to 1066.