Hi FunkyFerret69, welcome to itsallPC

At this stage, most indicators show that the GeForce 8800 GTX can be very easily CPU bound so Intel is probably the best way to go. You've chosen a pretty good time to consider buying new hardware; Intel have recently released their medium high end P35 chipset; the replacement for the P965 chipset released with the Core 2 Duo.

The new P35 officially supports 1333 MHz FSB for the E6x50 sequence Core 2 Duo processors due out later this year, and DDR3 support (DDR3-800, 1066 and 1333). You'd be a fool not to go for a P35 based motherboard (such as the ASUS P5K3 Deluxe or Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R). Core 2 Duo E6600 or E6700 would be the best choice of processor at this time.

The difficulty is probably choosing the memory. The P35 has been launched well ahead of the 1333 MHz Core 2 Duos and the high end X38 chipset (which will support PCI Express 2.0; which I doubt will be any great advantage for some time) to generate a market for DDR3. Your options are to choose a P35 motherboard with DDR2 and be stuck with it, or choose a P35 motherboard with DDR3 slots and fork out a small fortune for DDR3 memory in return for a more favourable future upgrade path.

Unfortunately, if you choose a superior Intel chipset based motherboard, you will not get the opportunity to use NVIDIA SLI. In reality, this is a pretty stupid technology, designed to target people with inadequacy issues. In a dollar to performance ratio, SLI is never as cost effective as simply buying the flagship model for each generation. However, if you're instant, a motherboard based on the NVIDIA i680 SLI (such as the ASUS P5N32-E SLI or Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6).