Does this make sense...

Thinking about a new system soon.
Compact and quiet, but reasonably powerful and although some overclocking capability would be nice but it's not essential and often hinders the quiet/cooling aspect of things (if it can run games it'll be fine for my other applications I'm sure!) Must be able to run games at native TFT res - probably 1680x1050. Not really worried about FSAA though if there's headroom for it ... great :)

So I'm thinking 8800GTS and E6600 (moving towards a Quad-core at some point perhaps) though I am open to AMD suggestions too. Latest socket etc would be nice to leave the upgrade path more open. I have no interest in SLi.

I also plan to run Linux on it, so mature/popular technology is probably preferrable. I would also like it to be kitted out for 64-bit OS and preferrably Vista (though I have no particular plans to run Vista/64-bit OS until/unless it and 64-bit drivers are widely available and work properly etc! :))

case Am liking the idea of a compact yet quiet case:
uATX Silverstone SUGO
uATX Antec nsk2400 (and possibly replace the PSU)
uATX Antec nsk1300 (as with 2400)
ATX Antec nsk 4000 (or 4400 and have a spare PSU)
What other non-flashy relatively cheap simle cases? Am leaning toward the nsk4000 at the moment I think.

CPU I guess probably a C2D, either the E6600 or slower as long as it's got the bits for Vista/virtualisation/etc. If the Q6600 etc fall massively in price then one of those might do the trick instead! Not quite sore what AMD are up to at the moment but they seem to be lagging, if not in gaming performance by much they certainly do in media encoding etc last time I checked?

motherboard really not sure on this front but probably s775 C2D, not confident that AMD won't change sockets again in 3 months. Three of the cases I picked are uATX and I believe that uATX is pretty good these days anyway? Something which should last some time, perhaps be compatible with quad-core. One thing I'd like is for the motherboard to have good stereo audio out and perhaps supporting EAX or something, so that I don't need to get a PCI audio card. I imagine it'll come as 7.1 or 8.1 but I'll likely only ever use it as Stereo/headphones -as long as it's good quality with decent enough positional audio for FPS it'll do fine.



...from there it'll be choosing a good efficient, quiet PSU with enough grunt without breaking the bank and deciding whether raid is worth it or whether just doing a regular backup would be wiser... HDD space in the case: at least 2, maybe 3, no need for a FDD or card-reader.

Any other good cases I should be looking at? Or motherboard suggestions? :)