New PC Build

[rozel]

Last year (July) I bought an Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi Motherboard, E6600 cpu, EN8600GTS Silent graphics card and 4 x 1Gb sticks of Corsair XMS 800mhz memory.

The idea was to rebuild my existing pc. However family matters have prevented me from doing so until now and these items together with 4 x 400Gb SATA drives (for a storage RAID system) lie in their boxes unused.

My plan now is to build a tower from scrtach using as many of these items as possible, adding to them what is necessary (see below) to make a new pc - my old one will then go to my wife.

OK - existing new kit - been thinking about my cpu - would I be better selling the 6600 and getting either the latest (6850?) or even a quad processor? I do a lot of encoding work and don't play games. I really do not want to change my memory even though I could get faster - may leave that for the future. Again with hindsight I wish I had bought an 8800 graphics card but as I have said I do not play games so maybe I'm ok with this.

Additional kit - I need a suitable case to take at least 6, maybe 8 internal HDD's with sufficient cooling. I like the Thermaltake range (my existing case is a Thermaltake) but not sure whether to go for a case with "liquid cooling" built in or to go for a more conventional cpu cooler. Also I would like some info on a suitable PSU for all my drives etc and a suitable Blu-Ray writer.

Hope I've not asked too many questions but I would like to build my system now and will probably use Vista as my os.

TIA

roz