Personally I would also take the Intel chipset, if only for the dedicated SATA bus (not sharing the PCIe bus). Asus is a good brand, personally I've been happily using Abit boards for a while now. If you want to overclock, however, I think the 965 chipset is easier to overclock than the 975 solution.
I also don't see the benefit of going for a Raptor drive unless you do not want to take the risks of having a RAID-0 and absolutely want to reduce your disk access time by a few milliseconds over a fast 7200 rpm drive.
If you want to save further money, I suppose you can go for DDR2-667 memory with good timings. The speed difference will be minimal but there is usually a big price difference.
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