So which motherboard did you go with, the Abit or the Gigabyte?

Oh, sorry, forgot to mention it: I went for the Gigabyte one (GA-P35-DS3L)

All right, a couple of notes after having used the new rig for a while:

ACPI had to be turned off to get the max freq on the processor (without OCing that is). Stock frequency is 2.5GHz, though ACPI reports that frequency throttling is in range of 2.0 - 2.33 GHz, so there is no way to push it up to the normal value. When booted with acpi=off, /proc/cpuinfo reports 2500.035 MHz. I do not care much about the throttling, so that's ok for now at least (may be a BIOS upgrade would help.... but right for the moment I'm happy).

Raptor is NOT a silent harddisk... Sounds more like an old floppy reader when stressed and is forced to seek all over the place (though perfectly silent when idle).

Up to this point I have not been able to get my dual screen setup working. The monitor that uses DVI cable is fine, though the other older monitor which uses VGA cable (and has therefore to be plugged into my nVidia DVIx2 card through an adaptor) is not recognized no matter what I do.

Dah that a Raptor drive is not silent and the metal case makes it worst. I suggest mount the Raptor hard drive in a 5.25" drive bay with a anti-vibration kit.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817999003
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817984001
http://www.directron.com/noisestrips.html

I suggest use cork for absorbing vibrations around fans and the power supply. Make sure the power supply ground is connected to the case, so you will not have any grounding problems. Use a continuity checker to test for this.

If you have a lot of money or do not mind a burn hole in your wallet, I suggest a SSD with ECC. Just use a mechanical hard drive for /var and /tmp. MTRON is a good SSD brand because they have an accessing time of less than a millisecond and has high throughput.