I went fairly high end because I wanted strong 3D capability and to eventually integrate into my home entertainment system. My project is built on an ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard. This board offers USB 3.0 and has two 6.0GB/s SATA ports and seven 3.0 GB/s additional SATA ports. For a processor, I was tempted to go with the new i7 980 but couldn't stomach the price so for the time being, I'm using an i7 950. Went with 12 GB of Corsair 1600 DDR3 memory, which turned out to be too hot for the 950 so I had to turn the voltage down to 1.60 to keep from cooking the CPU (temps were over 100 C when I first fired it up)
. I boot from an Intel 80 GB SSD and use a Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive for storage. My graphics card is an EVGA GeForce GTX480. All of this is powered by a Corsair 1200 W power supply because I plan to add a second 480 at some point. I also installed an HP Lightscribe Blue Ray burner and a multi-format card reader/control console. For a video display, I purchased an ASUS VG236H monitor bundled with two pair of NVIDIA 3D glasses. I think I future-proofed myself pretty well for the time being with this set-up.