For overclocking:
gigabyte ep45-ud3p + e8400 + 4 GB DDR2-1000 or 1066
There are plenty of other boards that do well enough. P5Q series is popular also.
if you need to have the best without overclocking you can step up to an e8600, mobo and ram can step down a bit though to DDR2-800 and a P43 based board.
e8400s overclock extremely well, with 4GHz on air very doable. You can step down to an e7200 to save some money, but they hit voltage / heat limitations earlier and top out at ~3.7 if you push it, more in the 3.3-3.5ish range if you don't push them hard.
The duals are not pushing out tons of heat and overclock well, you can get away without buying a super expensive cooler. Most common for best performance for the $$$ are things like Sunbeam core contact freezer, Xigmatek S1283, OCZ Vendetta2, these are in the $30 - $40 range including fan and perform very, very close to the current king, the Thermalright 120 Ultra Extreme (TRUE for short), which is generally over $50 + price of a fan.
You can go quad, but there is no current need to. UT3 and Flight Sim X are the only games I'm currently aware of that use more than 2 cores.
Video cards are pretty much you get what you pay for now. This wasn't always the case. There are good choices that save you $30 over another choice, but not the big winner at $200 that beats competitor's $300 card that sometimes happened in the past. The performance of video cards is pretty close between ATi and nVidia for a given price range.
4830 / 9800GT or 8800GT (9800GT and 8800GT are virtually identical)
4850 / 9800GTX
4870 / GTX260
4870x2 / GTX280
then crossfire / SLi setups.
What you need depends on your resolution and games. You don't need a GTX 280 for 1280x1024. and you can get away with a lot less if you're running Fallout 3 than if you're planning on Crysis. Midrange (like 4850 / 9800GTX) is pretty solid for 1280x1024 or 1650x1050 in most games. You can gage up and down from there.
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