Z68. Save the money. I built a system back in December for one of my sons for xmas. I had the same questions you have Jbot. I ended up going with 2 small mirrored SSD's to boot off of, and a spinner for data/porn. The intel boards also have that fancy smancy caching feature caching frequently accessed data on a small SSD and booting off of a spinner, but I just decided to be baller and go balls deep. The folks who are recommending value over performance, IMHO are steering you down the right path. The i5/Z68 will be more than sufficient for what you want to do, and the cutting edge in current CPU's don't justify their cost. Again, IMHO. The best advice I could give you...is if you can wait until xmas time....WAIT. The deals will be out of this world. You'll have to deal with a lot of rebates, but I received every single one I mailed out (made copies too...it was almost $300 in rebates) and there are a lot of combo deals for free games or GPU's. Worth the wait.