My setup which was close to 1900$ is:
Thermaltake Kandalf LCS Chassis: $280
Asus P5KC mainboard, P35 chipset, no SLI, however has 4 DDR2 and 2 DDR 3 slots, maxing at 8GB. $140
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 CPU (I got this through an Intel promotion for $220)
Corsair 1gb sticks of memory (I don't remember the models..) x 4. $87 /2gb
BFG 8800GTS OC (was $320.. less now that the 9 series is out. Still is better than the 9 series and is cheaper now)
Western Digital standard SATA hard drive ($78 got it at work)
Sony DVD/RW drive ($35 got it at work)
Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit (came with the intel CPU package)
Windows Vista Business 64bit (got free from a friend
)
37" 720 Samsung LCD television as my monitor($999 with service plan. Got it at work too.) All in all it's pretty sexy. Haven't had a need for overclocking yet. Runs Crysis on max settings pretty flawlessly. LCS keeps the system at roughly 80 degrees f. CPU capped for me at 101 degrees f. Replacing CPU with Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 soon and motherboard as well, haven't decided what to replace it with though. Want to make use of my secondary 8800gtsoc in SLI. All in all, fairly inexpensive for the performance.