SNeaKyTiKi :
thx for the help so far and lol sorry its gonna be used for gaming mostly and to get me through the rest of school. Thanks for the help. How much of a benefit is water cooling gonna get me? And are quad cores and crossfire worth the price?
*WARNING: Wall of text ahead*
There are two schools of thought for both the quad vs dual core issue and the single or dual GPU issue.
As far and the quad vs dual core issue, if you want the best performance in games for the immediate future (RTS seems to be the exception) then you want to go with a fast dual core processor. But it's only a matter of time before more games start taking advantage of quad core architecture, so if you'd rather sacrifice some performance now for future benefits you'll want to go with a quad core setup. If you do heavy multitasking, like video editing, quad core is the only way to go.
As for a crossfire or a single GPU setup, the only way crossfire is obviously worth it (assuming you're looking for pure performance, not price/performance) is if you're buying two top-of-the-line cards. In almost all circumstances, a single great card is better than two very good cards (crossfire doesn't scale 1:1 and sli scales even worse). So unless the dual-card setup can reach performance levels not attainable by a single card, your money is more well spent on a single card setup. Pretty much everyone will agree on that.
The other thing to consider is your future upgrade path, and this is where the disagreement happens. Some people believe that getting a single great card now with a crossfire/sli capable MoBo will give them a cheap upgrade path in the not so distant future when they can throw a second card in after the price has dropped. The other side believes that by the time you're ready for that second card it will be economically feasible to just buy a single new card that will outperform the two older cards. Personally I'm in the single-card camp, but neither side really know what the real answer is.