Solving the puzzle box...

So last night I thought I had my new system worked out; then I had to come to the office today, and got to rattling a few more things around in my brain:

1. I'm almost certainly going for a more traditional (and significantly cheaper) Rosewill case with two stock 120mm fans, rather than the incredibly shiny Antec P180 that rougewench uses. I can't seem to get my brain around how the enclosed front panel allows that front vent to do anything for the single rear fan, which seems to negate the whole purpose of having two separate airflow channels in the Antec case. I also like that the Rosewill case has its 'front' ports on top, since my case sits on the floor.
   
2. I've got no intention of running dual graphics cards, the so-called SLI/CrossFire setup. So why pay for a SLI-enabled motherboard, like the M2N-SLI? Well, apparently because non-SLI boards are rather difficult to find these days. The M3A looks promising, and has the added bonus that it has the AM2+ Socket if AMD ever gets their new processors working right... (...which reminds me)
   
3. I like AMD's past performance and will generally support the "little guy" over the corporate giant given rough equivalencies, but Intel is beating the crap out of AMD's latest few chips. It's not a suicide pact...but on the other hand I know 0% about Intel's chips, except that they seem to have stabilized on a much longer socket timeframe than AMD, which has sprinted through Socket 754/939/940/A/AM2/AM2+... *rolls eyes* - but on the other hand, Intel's price point does not fill me with any joy.
   
4. Finally, can anyone explain what the deal is with DDR2 memory clocked at more than 800 MHz? The M3A board boasts "native DDR2-1066 support", but the DDR2 specification maxes out at 800 and everything else is "factory overclocking". Is there really an advantage to this, then? For an added bonus hassle, NewEgg doesn't even list the M3A on their Memory Configurator, for the purposes of matching memory to boards (although here's its Qualified Vendor List, before anyone asks).

On the gripping hand, all of this twiddling got the system price back down about $150, which was much closer to 'reasonable' in my brain (even if someone else is paying for it).