how fast should this build be?

how fast for what? you might need to clarify what you expect to do from this rig. If its 1900x1200 gaming.. yeah.. its gonna slow you down.. if its for surfing the internet.. its great!

1024x768 gaming, web surfing, and editing word documents. how fast should it start up ms word 2007?

299,792,458 m/s

Are you going to be doing any overclocking or run multiple graphics cards because that mobo series is a bit overkill overwise. look at getting a P45 chipset instead maybe.

faster than booting into windows  

The speed of light?  

You sure? An object with mass requires infinite amount of energy to reach that speed  

don't even remember anyone timing how slow (not fast) their MS office starts *grins*

I notice that Firefox is slower to start then Explorer *shrug* and after I swapped to Vista (was on my laptop) then I just use Explorer and are quite happy with it.

It would fit in one of the 3 'fastnesses' between "Somewhat Quick", and "Pretty good but my friend's is faster". Please take into account these are imperial measurements, not metric.

Also, consider the fact that a very fast HDD like a velociraptor would bring down load times tremendously, while overclocking with LN2 wouldn't do that much, as far as loading goes.

thanks for the replies.
i actually have this build (if you didnt guess) and it isnt running "as smooth as silk". ive seen videos of other similar builds and my build doesnt perform much faster than if i were to replace my e8400 with a e6750 (my mothers computer)
-the hdd is brand new; passed SeaTools tests yesterday
-fresh XP install just yesterday; only using <1gb of space (no porn is slowing it down) right now
-i removed the hdd jumper
-i updated the bios

any ideas?

p.s. im using XP home