Yeah I saw someone do this on a cpu, I seem to recall he had it as a sandwich with brown sauce, needless to say the guy was english...

Nice rig, AliasAlpha! Good to see you got yourself a good gaming rig finally, as (IIRC) you've been gaming on some pretty outdated PC hardware.

See, now that is a sign that I should upgrade as well. WITH THE POWER THAT WAS GRANTED TO ME, I WANT MORE MONEY! ... ... ... ... Damn, didnt work.

Well on the bright side I also ordered Chaos Rising so we can soon do that marathon you were wanting

Yeah my old gaming rig died in 08 so all my time on GOG I've been running a laptop that does its best but simply isn't up to the tasks I want

Congratulations, Aliasalpha :-)
Now you just need to get the hell out of Australia so you'll actually have something sensible to do with it ;-)

I just did a cheapo upgrade to an AMD Phenom II X4 Black Edition CPU with 4 gigs of DDR3 1600 RAM. Now I just need to scrounge some money to upgrade my old ass video card (8800 GS) and I'll be solid.
How fast is your HD? Mine's old and slow, severely impinging on my comp's speed, make sure its up to par speed wise.

Well the 500GB I bought is a 7200rpm but thats for bulk data (why pretend, bulk GAME) storage, I've got a 10000rpm WD raptor to use as my OS drive, that, my mouse and my speakers were the only parts I could salvage from my previous rig

When you get around to adding those 1 or 2 TB external HD's . . . These enclosures are working extremely well for me . . . cool to the touch running 7 / 24
I tried the standard externals with no active cooling . . . two out of three failed in less than a year.
Edit: I have installed several games and can't tell any diff in the response time for the drives (eSata connection of course)

Well... My power supply and monitor totally kick your PC's ass... :-) But otherwise you edged me out.
I went with the i5 750... which is arguably close because it is quite overclock friendly, but lacks hyperthreading so you'd smoke me in head to head Photoshop Deathmatch (and games).
After balancing budget, features, bla bla... I settled on the ATI 5870 and I have to say I really wanted your card, but I'm happy that mine exceeded my expectations.
I got the G.Skill Ripjaws, 8 gigs... but your setup is triple channel and mine is dual. I only bought the second 4 gig kit because it was on sale and even though it is a bit overkill, I wanted headroom for future possibilities.
My PSU is an Ultra 850 Modular... which I only have because it was gifted to me new and in the box ( YAY! ) from a friend who works for a tech hardware review site, otherwise I'd have something less impressive.
And though I already have a pair of 22 inch Viewsonics, I decided to re-purpose them to other machines and buy a 27 inch Samsung. It isn't the monitor I'd have chosen for professional photo or video work, but as my new box is strictly for gaming, it turned out to be the best choice I could have made.
I did not buy a sound card. I'm running optical out to a home theater receiver to drive some really nice speakers (Audio Pro Allrooms - which sound awesome and are finished in a piano gloss red) :-)
I've had my new toy for about 6 weeks and I have not really stressed it out yet. What are you gonna be doing to put your box through the ringer?

That's a sweet rig you've got there. :)
There are hardly any games that can take advantage of that much RAM as yet (the Crysis series being a noteworthy exception, of course), but it's always a good idea to have slightly more RAM than you actually need (even the mightiest systems slow to a crawl if you hit maximum resource usage). This rig should carry you until at least the start of the next console generation (which will probably have high enough RAM demands to force 64-bit PC gaming to become reality).
EDIT: if you are going to give Crysis a workout on this rig make sure you are actually running the 64-bit version; on my system at least the Start Menu shortcuts point to the 32-bit version for some reason which would be a terrible waste for a rig such as yours.

Photoshop Deathmatch? Is that a new feature in CS5? Really must get it... I almost went for a stronger PSU but i couldn't find a modular one that wasn't a hundred bucks more expensiveI was close to re-using an 82cm LCD TV but I wasn't sure on the response time and wasn't sure if I'd get a miniHDMI with my video card so I might have to connect a top of the line GPU with a VGA cable... Well I bought Metro 2033 and the Chaos Rising addon for Dawn Of War 2 both of which I'm planning to run at 1920x1080 with all the AA & AF set to maximum. Also I'm looking forward to running a full suite of 3dmark tests again, my old monitor didn't support the res needed to run the full test and the gpu on my current lappy can't run all the features. Weird thing to look forward to I'll grant...

Good stuff! Congrats on the new system, AA.

How outdated are we talking here?
I personally went from this (family PC from 2002):
-AMD Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino
-crappy stock AMD HSF
-512 MB (2*256 MB) DDR-266, generic crap
-ATI Radeon 9600 XT (the only upgrade; originally integrated GeForce 2 GTS)
-integrated SoundMAX crap
-60 GB 5,400 RPM HDD
-crappy Compaq nForce mobo
-crappy 200W PSU
-crappy Compaq case
-Windows XP Home
To this in November/December 2007 because I couldn't take it any more and dropped US$1450 on this:
-Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0
-crappy stock Intel HSF
-2 GB (2*1 GB) Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667
-Galaxy GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB (non-reference to the point where it doesn't even resemble a reference 8800 GT visually)
-Auzentech X-Fi Prelude
-Western Digital Caviar SE16 (Blue) WD5000AAKS (500 GB, 7,200 RPM)
-DVD-RW + LightScribe SATA drive
-Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P Rev. 2.0
-PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610
-a "6AR6" mid-tower case (I call it such because multiple brands use the same basic case design and have those four digits in their model numbers)
-Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit OEM
HUGE change, as you can see. What was totally unplayable even on minimum settings before could now be maxed out with ease. Alt-Tabbing out of a game and into something else suddenly became practical. For once, I had access to a system I could call "fast", and since it was not the family computer, but my own, I could do as I damn well pleased with it.
I'm still running largely the same hardware, but with a few upgrades done in the two-and-a-half years since:
-Sunbeamtech Core-Contact Freezer (This, the bundled Tuniq TX-2, and a good lapping of my Q6600's heatspreader let me take it to 3.2 GHz, 8x400. Unfortunately, 3.6 GHz at 9x400 is an impossibility with the core voltage required unless I upgrade to liquid cooling or possibly even phase-change.
-8 GB (4*2 GB) G.SKILL DDR2-800 (One of the Crucial Ballistix DIMMs failed hard on me, leaving me with 1 GB in single-channel to run Vista 64-bit. NOT FUN. So after I got some Christmas money, I went out in January 2009 and maxed out my mobo for the low, low sum of US$75. In retrospect, I should've bought even more DDR2 and sold it at today's prices for massive profit...)
-Aplus/ABS Tagan Black Pearl (A nice, sleek, spacious full-tower case, which I got for $100 shipped. Could've saved an extra ten bucks if I didn't miss a Newegg deal.)
-Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1 TB, 7,200 RPM (I managed to cram that WD5000AAKS pretty full, such that I needed a new drive pretty badly. Now I have something with twice the space and twice the performance! I still keep the WD5000AAKS in there as a secondary drive, though. Never enough storage.)
I'm still left with a 2.5-year-old CPU, GPU, and motherboard, though.
Anyway, enjoy your new PC! I don't think performance issues will be a problem for the next one or two years with that setup.

At least with a Core2Quad you should be able to get some impressive overclocking happening, gigabyte mobos are pretty overclock friendly too
I was contemplating overclocking my laptop's core2duo but its a HP and they're keen on locking their systems down. Also the heat has nearly destroyed the machine twice before I modded the cooler so i thought it might be best to avoid any more heat

Very sexy indeed. Though I think having the Antec Nine Hundred on that one will be better. I R jealous.