As far as brands go I use Corsair XMS Pro Low-Latency RAM in my gaming machines. OCZ apparently makes great memory for gaming as well. I would stay away from Maxtor and go with WD or Seagate or Hitachi/IBM. NEC makes great optical drives. I just noticed your motherboard has slots for both DDR and DDR2. Interesting. My guess is that for the same rating the DDR2 should be faster but who knows? DDR should be cheaper anyway.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22." "It's the best there is." M22ti VP150 EP350 QS8 M3Ti