I love the E Series C2D chips. For the price, they give an awful lot of grunt, and they're very overclockable, from what I've read. I have a 7200 still running stock, and I haven't yet even felt the need to push it. Though, a coworker has one of these and ran it solidly at 3.2GHz on STOCK cooling, bumping it up to 3.6 with a Zalman something-or-other-that-I-can't-remember.

It's amazing how far down RAM prices have come just in the last few months. When I did my last upgrade in October, I spent about $95 for my 8GB of DDR2-800. Now, I could pick that up for around $50.