fast, quiet, stylin' pc for $1600

[AlpineCarver]

i would appreciate your critique of the following plan,
made after extensive research on this website and
many others. (this is my first post here)

base system:

• cpu - athlon 64 3400+
  motherboard - msi k8n-neo platinum (nVidia nForce3 250Gb chipset)
  memory - 1Gbyte - corsair valueselect vs1gbkit400
  video - sapphire atlantis radeon 9600 256M (passive heatsink)
  disk - western digital WD740GD 74G SATA 10,000 rpm
  dvd burner - pioneer dvr-108 16X dual-layer
  flash memory drive in 5.25" bay - aftech p9
  keyboard - liteon 85-key usb
  mouse - logitech
  operating system - WinXP Pro

with an antec slk-3700bqe case, this would be a decent, basic, moderately-fast, white-box pc, costing around $1200, and probably pretty quiet with just the addition of an upgraded cpu cooler and some sorbothane to suspend the disk.

for an additional $400 i intend to get the following:

• upgrade the case to a Lian Li PC-V1100B
  case fans - i plan to try: nexus d12sl-12, enermax uc-12fab,papst 4412fgl
  cpu cooler - zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu
  northbridge cooler - zalman passive northbridge heat sink
  power supply - seasonic ss-400agx
  temp & fan speed monitor / controller - mCubed T-Balancer XL
  disk suspension - improvise something using 1/2" sorbothane

total: around $1600

the choices i'm the least confident about are the motherboard, memory, and disk drive. i'd appreciate any insight anyone may have about any of this. i realize the lian-li case adds a lot of cost and no added performance, but i really like the way it looks

thanks!

[Trip]

I just bought 1 Gig of Corsair Value Select from Newegg for $150, the sale ends at 4:00PM today. I thought that was a pretty good price

Your system looks good to me.

The vid card is surprisingly good.

[scara]

That should be a pretty good system. I doubt you'll have any problems with the mobo and ram. The only concern I would have is the noise of that Raptor; sure its fast but it might get annoying. Do you really need that extra speed or would you be better off with more storage space and a quieter system?

[markjia]

Looks good.

I would choose to do the alternatives in this order:

1. Drive suspension - The raptors are terirble with respect to noise, until they are quieted, anything else is pointless.

2. CPU cooler - The zalman is great

3. Case fan - with the raptor's it would be worthwhile to get an additional fan to help cool them

4.PSU - The stock BQE PSU is pretty noisy. You can mod it with something like a Panaflo to save money though.

5. Chipset cooler - not sure if it is absolutely necessary, but i guess it would be safer.

6. mCubed T-Balancer XL - Don't have any experience with this, but unless you have 3+ case fans, I don't think it is all that necessary.

7. Lian Li case - The BQE is a fine case, with exceptional airflow. So unless you want the Lian Li for aesthetic reasons, I would stick with the BQE.