Although I am personally an Intel user, I have multiple close friends who have invested in that exact platform... asus nforce2, 9700aiw, dual ddr corsairs.
Neither of them use their old soundblaster live's anymore- for gaming they feel that the integrated does just as much if not more justice than the SBL ever did. Secondly, I know one of them has a Barton XP2500 overclocked to 2.2ghz or so with a volcano9. He says its really stable but really wants to try a different heatsink. It's always looked like a good way to go to me if you get a barton so you can use dualddr333 instead of the wastefully slow dualddr266.
the guy with the overclocked barton is holding the 3dmark2001 record (14,500?) in our circle right over a p4 2.66 on a sis655 on the same video board, so, it must be an okay way to go
i hope ive been of some help
