i've got that motherboard, an e4500 chip, and 8 gigs of that ram. i've got a mixture of samsung drives, but i recently purchased one of those tb drives for my htpc downstairs. i re-used an antec case, and updated the psu to a 380w truepower, i'm currently posting from it running 2003 server x64 edition where it is happily hosting vmware server with 11 vm's running simultaneously. i think it will be fine for what your wanting to do with it.