RedEyeFly: Your list looks pretty good. For normal trading (with lots of charts and execution tools), from my experience it probably hardly touches 4GB. I built my box originally with 12GB RAM but later trimmed it down to 6GB. More than adequate. But your situation is different. You are doing lots of data crunching so I suppose extra memory helps. You may want to monitor the actual memory usage when your box is doing its things and see if it really uses that extra memory. It doesn't seem price is much of your concern building this box. Good deal. Not that it matters... but what is "2 ball" CPU cooler? I googled some images, but didn't understand where the "ball" come from. Just sounds funny.
I would recommend not replacing a hard drive with SSD but add a SSD. Typically SSD is much more expensive in terms of price-per-byte stored than conventional hard drives. I played with an Intel SSD 40GB on my system. Easy to set up. It is totally transparent to users. Use the SSD as if it is a regular disk drive. Install Windows on it, etc.. Later on add the regular hard drive for more storage. With the budget you have, with a 970 processor and 12GB RAM, etc.. It seems not out of line to have a 160GB SSD. The Windows operating system and your software would probably take up 20GB or so. The rest 140GB can be for your data storage. Is that enough? The SSD to me was not adding much value because I only use my system for charting. Saving 10 seconds in reboot time does not appeal to me. But if your setup requires lots of I/O's on files, you definitely can take advantage of it more than I do. BTW: the price for Western Digial Caviar Black 1TB drive of $239 seems quite high though. Because you can order one on Amazon for $86.99. Newegg for $89.99.
HA, the "2 ball" CPU is a cooling unit for the CPU. I don't know if I even need it but it's comparatively cheap and since I could see the CPU running at a high level of output for an extended period of time, I figured having a cooler is cheap insurance. Here's a link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118046 I have no idea if this is the best product for this purpose, so feel free to check me on this.
Bolimomo: Thank you for discussing the SSD interfacing possibilities. As you correctly noted, the price listed for the drives was expensive on account of a higher quantity. Thank you for the shopping recommendations. I wanted at least (2) drives which are over (1T) of memory each because some of my data files are absolutely massive and I wanted to be able to call them up in a single pull from a single drive.
Oh... sorry. The price was for a quantity of 3 drives. I only now noticed. I kept mis-thinking everything was Qty:1. In your case... it makes a lot of sense to have multiple disks. And you are probably going to set up RAID? (If not, I think it's worth it.)
I have seen those pictures. Just didn't know what the "ball" was referring to. I noticed that these CPU's get hotter as they spend more time in computing than as in idling. In my use, the heat has not been an issue. But I can imagine if you send the CPU to constantly over 50% in use or something like that... it would make sense to have additional cooling.