Ram and mobo huh? Always been partial to Kingston and Crucial higher end ram but now I'm leaning towards Corsair. I'm running their dominator 1066mhz ram now and haven't had an issue overclocking. They make a nice cooling fan unit, cools 4 gigs just fine. As for motherboards, I'm looking for a highend gaming board right now, still havent decided. Really p***ed at gigabyte these days. I picked up their Quad N680-SLIDQ6 rev. 2 and was fighting drivers in XP for over a year, went to Vista Ultimate out of necessity and now my nforce drivers are finally working properly. Make sure you get some decent cooling for your system. Thermaltake and Asus have a nice high end cpu cooler, corsair for your ram, and get a box that allows additional 120mm fans.