What someone said already, if you take it down a notch, you'll lose a 10% in performance, but the price will go down half of that, so you'll be able to save the money for the next unavoidable upgrade that'll come in a few couple of years. Never buy the beast.
The new sandy-bridge cpus are going to be released within the next 2-3 months, and they're beasts: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=23377351&postcount=14902 It also wont be that much longer before end of the year sales start happening, so I'd wait just a bit before going all out on a new system.
I don't know crap about hardware, but my bro knows a little. We're building a computer, and here's what we've come up with so far. We need suggestions and recommendations, especially on compatibility and the motherboard. Here's the list, this is my bro's email he forwared to me: Chances are I won't have a clue of what…
An advice, don't buy the "ultimate" components. That "beast" will get obsolete in less than a year and you will regret of wasting too much money. I don't recommend to buy SSD, they are very expensive now, and it's not a big deal for what it costs (and less for the GBs). You can buy high perfomance HDs with more than 100mbs…