Quick question: If I understand correctly, the following three components should work with each other, correct?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128429
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=19-115-067
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231277

Optionally, anyone happen to have any experience with these particular items or ones like them? Any hidden gotchas that aren't explicitly mentioned that I might want to be aware of (e.g., certain limitations or unavailable advanced features specific to this combination of hardware)? (In particular, if I understand correctly, I'd need a CPU model with built-in GPU if I were planning to use the onboard graphics ports on this mobo, but I intend to use a separate Nvidia card which I'm using with my current system instead.)

Just thought I'd ask since it seems like everything I thought I knew about buying PC hardware becomes meaningless every other week and you practically have to get a degree and then some to keep up with this stuff.

Yup, those should work together and yes you need a Clarkdale CPU with an on-chip GPU to use the onboard VGA (DSUB-9) port.

If you are planning on running a discreet card, don't get a mobo with onboard video (which that one does). Also, LGA 1156 is dead, it has been replaced with LGA 1155 which is what Sandy Bridge runs on. You definitely want to get Sandy Bridge instead - significantly faster.

It doesn't really have onboard video, it just has the hardware to take advantage of CPU's with the on die GPU's. But yeah follow Kllrnohj's advice here, he is rarely wrong in this area.

Well dang, they must be introducing a new type of CPU socket every two days. Sheesh.

Okay, how about this mobo and one of these CPUs, keeping the same RAM I mentioned in the first post?

It looks to me like those CPU, mobo, RAM combinations will work properly, since you have DDR3 1600 that seems supported by the motherboard, and your CPUs match the LGA1155 socket and chipset. I'm a bit sketched out by the motherboard memory warning in the description.

Should be good - I'd recommend the i5-2500K and overclocking it.

Thanks for the responses, guys! I've gone ahead and ordered the parts. I really hope I won't have long-term issues this time. I wouldn't have even had to spend money on this new stuff if the mobo/RAM that I bought at a local store a couple of years back didn't turn out being such a buggy, unstable piece of junk.

Sorry to hear you got shortchanged, Travis. Best of luck with your new hardware, and I hope you'll give us the final postmortem about whether it worked when you get the parts.

The good news and bad news so far:

Good news is that amazingly, that stupid Intel processor fan/heatsink thing actually went in easily and worked properly the first time, which is the exact opposite of my experience the first time I ever installed one.

Bad news is that the PATA controller is some weird thing that Linux doesn't even support out of the box. In other words, I couldn't boot because it couldn't find its own PATA boot drives during early kernel bootup. What the hell is this? Isn't the whole point of ATA is that it's a freaking standard?! I don't see how I could be expected to worry about something so basic working. Long story short, I ended up getting the system to boot, though, using the “all_generic_ide=1” boot option (once I figured out that they're apparently supposed to be underscores, not hyphens—evidently all those support forums Google turned up had it wrong; no wonder the option wasn't working for anyone ). Though I think it's rather dumb that the kernel doesn't do this by default automatically when needed. But at least since I can boot now, I can try whatever those kernel patches for Marvell PATA controller support I read about at some point, if I feel like it.

Right now, though, I just want a break, so I'm off for a while. I'll come back and check out everything else later.

If you go into the BIOS settings, you can sometimes tweak PATA and SATA legacy modes, although to be honest it's been a while since I used PATA drives, so I can't recall if BIOSes have the same legacy options for PATA as SATA.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any PATA options to speak of. It's all stuff applying only to SATA, which seems to work fine. (Ironic, since it seems that Linux generally has support issues with cutting-edge stuff, not legacy stuff.)

Meh, that's annoying. And yeah, that's generally my experience with Linux as well. I still haven't found good enough tablet drivers and support to be able to run Linux on my tablet PCs, sadly.