Well I still plan on building a new PC myself.  Just because I have to get the motherboard from the Borg Collective doesn't mean I have to let Dell box it up into the Voyager PC.

Time to dig up that soldering gun, for we must unsolder what has been soldered.

I had this combo as well well, technically i still have and use it as backup

but replaced it with x58 + i7 980x + 24GB DDR3 in summer 2010 and have no plans to upgrade that in near future, as its still awesome

at one point though, i went batshit crazy with GPUs... i built the computer for some archviz rendering (and obviously gaming and other pointless stuff), therefore the extreme intel CPU....but just few months later decided to dump CPU based rendering apps for new GPU-based Octane renderer.... so i bought Gainward GTX460 1GB...turned out i needed more VRAM...so i sold it and bought basically the same card, just with 2GBs of VRAM, but felt it was not fast enough, so i bought another one LOL...and found out 2 cards are BS with my mobo layout/case combo, as they were loud as hell during  load... so again i sold one, kept other one for the older machine and finally did what i had to do in the first place, bought gtx590

the moral lesson of this story is just to get in the future, what i think i need/want and not f**k around, because something is too expensive/maybe not worth etc...cause i wont be satisfied with second-string solutions anyway, and fixing wrong choices can be in the end more costly as well... 

There will probably be some niche market for hobby kit pc parts for a long time, but the trend seems to be moving towards completely integrated devices with few upgrade options.  Apple is kind of leading the way here, but it does make certain amount of sense for the big manufacturers if they can make better products for cheaper in this manner.  Not saying it is better for us, but I can see how it is better for their bottom line.