btw, i was wondering, does a LGA1155 motherboard support a LGA1366 CPU?
Nope.
Crimson: Unless you have picked up on this (and just not updated the OP), you'll probably want to go for one of the newer i5/i7 parts. eg: the 2500K or the 2600K. There's very little difference between these two (the 2600K has hyperthreading, 100MHz higher clocked cores, 150Mhz higher clocked
integrated graphics, a larger cache, and a much higher price) and you probably won't notice it unless you're doing video encoding or running a ton of programs at one time.
Less importantly:
SATA 3Gb/s vs 6Gb/s is largely irrelevant with platter hard drives. They max out at <200MB/s (~1.7Gbit/s) reading from the actual disk, and the faster cache access doesn't make much of a difference.
Have a look at this
Windows 7 editions comparison chart. It's very unlikely that you'll need or want any of the features present in ultimate that aren't in pro (and you probably won't care about the extra features in pro.) In my opinion, Pro is the safest option.
Well the case says it takes ATX up to 10.6", but the mobo says it's 12"x8.6", which seems kind of odd, because I thought all ATX mobos were the same size.
I always refer to
this table.
Manufacturers don't always need the full dimensions listed by the spec, so they'll produce boards that aren't full sized. However, since they're still larger than the next size down, they'll be labeled for the bigger spec.
