Looking for opinions feedback on first new build in 5 years o.O

[ZeRo_1]

Well...I'm excited. I've been patiently awaiting the day when I'd finally be able to not only afford, but justify building a new pc. I've been running an old opteron 180 with 2gigs of DDR and an AGP ATI 3850 lol. Needless to say, its getting more than a little outdated and is no longer able to play current games at acceptable settings/resolutions. I intend to use the new system mostly for gaming (FPS, MMO, RPG, RTS, etc), video encoding, and web browsing. I'm currently using a single 24" 1920x1080 monitor, but will at some point in the next year be looking at a 27" monitor. I doubt i'll be able to justify an eyefinity setup in the foreseeable future as I have 4 kids to keep fed. I'm not using any parts from the old system as I plan on giving it to family members that are using an even more outdated system.

I love overclocking my system and attempting to get the best performance out of it for the dollar. Its also important to me to build a relatively quiet system with a case that has dust filters and good cooling. I only have roughly 21" of clearance under my desk, which limits my choice of cases to most mid towers. This is what I've picked out so far for my ~$1600 budget:

Case: Silverstone RV02B-EW

PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850HX 850W

Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD65 (or 55...seems the only difference is 2 extra SATAIII, 2 esata, and dual bios)

CPU: Core i5 2500k

CPU Cooler: Thermalright Silver Arrow (debated on the noctua D14, but ultimately liked this one better)

RAM: G.Skill Sniper 2x4GB DDR3 1600 cas 9 1.5v (low profile heat spreaders for the huge cpu cooler)

Video Card: Sapphire ATI 6950 2GB (I realize 2GB is a little more than i need at my current resolution, but I usually use my hardware for at least 2-3 years and expect to run higher resolutions eventually)

Disk Drive/s: ASUS DRW-24B1ST...standard cheap dvd burner (considered a blue ray drive, but i have no need for one currently)

Hard Drive/s: Western Digital RE4 WD5003ABYX 500GB x3 in Raid 0. Really considered an SSD but the price/GB is still so high, and i'm honestly not sold on the long term reliability at this point. I've always wanted to try a conventional raid 0 setup and figured I'd give that a try. I expect many of you will have suggestions on this point lol.

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

I want great performance, and reliability with the ability to upgrade down the road if needed. Thoughts? Suggestions?

 

[Dangman]

Even with overclocking in mind, you do not need DDR3 1600 RAM since you do not touch the RAM at all when overclocking the Sandy Bridge CPUs. Not to mention that there is very little real world performance difference between DDR3 1600 and DDR3 1333 RAM. So you'll be fine with this RAM actually:
$80 - G.Skill Value Series F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT 2 x 4GB DDR3 1333 RAM

Hard drive wise, those WD 500GB drives are extremely poor choices for the money. You can get higher performance and more space with this drive:
$65 - Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

GPU wise, I would be looking at a XFX, Asus, or Gigabyte branded card for a longer warranty.

 

[ZeRo_1]

Even with overclocking in mind, you do not need DDR3 1600 RAM since you do not touch the RAM at all when overclocking the Sandy Bridge CPUs. Not to mention that there is very little real world performance difference between DDR3 1600 and DDR3 1333 RAM. So you'll be fine with this RAM actually:
$80 - G.Skill Value Series F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT 2 x 4GB DDR3 1333 RAM

Hard drive wise, those WD 500GB drives are extremely poor choices for the money. You can get higher performance and more space with this drive:
$65 - Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

GPU wise, I would be looking at a XFX, Asus, or Gigabyte branded card for a longer warranty.

Thank you for the suggestions! Regarding the memory, I was under the impression that even though we don't use traditional methods to overclock the Sandy Bridge platform, can't you still run the memory at the faster speeds to increase memory bandwidth? Or am I to understand that there is virtually no performance increase in running faster memory?

The hard drives i picked due to HD Tune benchmarks I saw from another user running 3 of those in raid 0. They aren't the best bang for the buck due to the fact that they are the raid edition drives and cost slightly more per GB. I'll look around for reviews on your suggested drive. Thanks!

I had picked that particular GPU due to current pricing on Newegg bringing it around $260 after MIR. I hadn't considered warranty at all and appreciate your recommendations.