Actually memory has gotten more expensive while video cards have gotten cheaper. ATI's 4xxx line is cheap/great.

the HP refurb on w00t. it's tiny, has no airflow or space for expansion and a 300 watt power supply.
you are awesome. that answers questions i didn't even know i had.

I'll newegg everything, but you'd be surprised how competitive CyberPower's pricing is. Once shipping costs are all said and done it's usually comparable.

You're very welcome, Captfitz; glad I could help :)

It's also a HP which is reason enough to avoid it.
I'd have to agree on the RAID being a waste, you basically put data at risk to gain a negligible increase in speed, basically just the access time on the drive's channel. It was designed for high demand critical servers where a small difference is an important one.

sounds like it's not even worth the tiny $15 bump,
and the 10,000 rpm drives are like $200 more.
so I guess I'll go with the ssd boot disk and a 7200 rpm drive for games

Wow, Pythos already did a damn good job covering most of things that needed to be considered. I'll chip in a bit on the RAID issue and say that RAID 0 will only help performance if HDD r/w speeds are the limiting performance factor in a game, and this is almost never the case for games these days. This taken in conjunction with the increased chance of failure already covered means that RAID 0 tends to just not be worth using for gaming computers. I'll also second Pythos' comments on the PSU- it's the single component that can cause the biggest problems if something goes wrong with it, so make sure you're not skimping on it. Also, with regards to liquid cooling, unless you're planning on making overclocking a serious hobby of yours then it's going to just be a headache waiting to happen that won't be helping you in any way (a good heatsink/fan is just fine unless you're really pushing a CPU past its limits).

I chose a 600w PSU, which should be good. Also, the liquid cooling is free, and it's made by AseTek. I don't know the company but I figure liquid cooling must be at least marginally better and if it's a free upgrade promotion, probably worth it, if only for the lack of a noisy fan.

It's not just the wattage that's important on a PSU, but the quality of the manufacturing (in other words, who makes it). A high wattage PSU made with poor components just means there will be that much more power frying the rest of the system's components if something goes wrong with the PSU. With regards to the liquid cooling, a few degrees lower temperatures don't mean much as long as the CPU is operating within safe margins. On the other hand, the mechanical components of a liquid cooling system (e.g. the pumps) tend to be under more stress than the small fan motor of an air cooling system, so will likely break down sooner (thus requiring a replacement, which is much more involved for liquid cooling than for air cooling). Additionally, depending on the manufacturing quality you could be dealing with leaks at some point in the future, which can mean just a small mess to clean up or possibly fried components to deal with (if the manufacturer was stupid or cheap enough to use an electrolytic liquid). Basically it's just a case of liquid cooling posing increased failure risks while not offering anything significant in compensation outside of very specific scenarios (e.g. extreme overclocking).