First question is what do you have? this includes an old CRT kicking around that you do not mind using for a month or two while you save up some more (bad monitors are not the way to do).
Second is are you planning on overclocking and if so by how much?
Regarding that board it is a damn nice board although I can not see the need for three 16x PCIe slots unless you are building a monster machine (two card SLI is nice but the extra for a PSU to handle it is not, three card is even worse).
The premium you pay for such a thing is about $30 which is one up in another area that matters more (hard drive, processor, graphics card or even some like decent keyboard and mouse; for all the hardware in the case it is the mouse and keyboard you touch all the time), a quick search of newegg says there are equivalent boards (or slightly worse for trivial things like 5.1 vs 7.1 sound) at $30 less and I dare say you can stretch that further if you wanted.
What Omega_2 said about good ram and good PSU holds. Ram I would stick with DDR2 for now, keep the timings tight 5,5,5,something is what I would aim for. As for how much, I still say 2 gigs can get the job done perfectly for most people but 4 gig sets are getting very cheap for good product so I would consider that.
CPU: intel of some form is what you appear to be going for (and I would agree, AMD are good but are lagging a bit). The question then becomes dual or quad core and I would say go with dual as hardly anything makes use of dual let alone quad processing and you can either drop the price or score a clockspeed boost for your trouble.
Graphics. You say this is a summer project, depending on how long you can wait graphics cards prices often drop nicely in line for the new models/Christmas gaming rush. Things seem to have shifted a bit in the realms of the PC so I do not know how it will play out this year though. I say stick with a single card but make it a good one, alas I am not up on the current stuff (reason being my 7900gs still runs all I care to quite adequately, the 8xxx is not much above them and the 9XXX is a tweak on the 8xxx).
OS/software, tough one here. Up to you really, know that 32 bit operating systems in the consumer range (servers and some custom stuff is a bit different) do not support more than 4 gigs of ram and everything else has to sit on the same bus (if your graphics card rocks a gig, which it could well do, then you have 3 less the other stuff on the machine which means you have a whole 2.5 gigs for normal ram by the time all is said and done). Software is free and as such somewhat of a trivial concern though.
By my reckoning this leaves case, hard drive and disc drives.
Case is personal preference really (get one without a PSU and buy one though)
hard drive; go with sata, avoid solid state for now, I would also avoid RAID for the time being, cache means little, choose one with spin speed at 7200rpm or above and then it is up to you to pick a big one with good reviews.
disc drives are up to you, personally I am sticking with a decent DVD burner for the foreseeable future.
Extras: onboard cooling of graphics and CPU should be good (the core2 line have been good for most people, even for half decent overclocking), CPU cooling could be considered if you really want quiet or plan on serious overclocking although it might be worth springing for a tube of thermal paste.
