I got everything together again this weekend for the system build and everything works well.  Very well.  I learned a couple things, too.

First:  While the stock cooler on the Q6600 is very nice and much better than any previous cooler I have used from Intel, it is a bit small for the CPU if you ever intend to do much with it.  Under full heat mode of Prime95, it reached 75C, which is not terrible, but a bit higher than I am comfortable with.  So a $35 Ninja Mini is on its way to replace that.

Second: $270 for a motherboard is a lot of money, but you really get what you pay for.  The Asus Maximus Formula is the easiest board I have ever used both for installation and configuration.   I have Overclocked the Q6600 from 2.4GHz to 2.94GHz with no effort at all, simply by setting the AI settings to Q6800.  Once I get the Ninja installed, I hope to push it up one more level and get 3.2GHz.  The irony being that is what my Prescott runs today.  I even got STALKER included in the box.

I wait for the Sapphire HD3870 to be delivered later this week, then it's super gaming season for me!  I can't wait to see how Stalker runs on the new rig with full dynamic lighting compared to my old system that would only run without.  And you should see LAME run, it's amazing fast 20x at high quality VBR settings.  That's 4 to 5 times the Prescott, and only on one core.  I can't wait to see video encoding performance.