I would not get that asus 27" monitor, 1920x1080 at 27" doesn't seem like a good deal. I bought a 27" 2560x1440 eBay monitor from korea a month ago for kids PC @ 349 and it looks stunning, no dead pixels and display is awesome. Gonna buy two more over the summer to do eyefinity I think.
celebrindal, your PC config looks great. I think you may be overspending on your GPU card, $550 for a 680 seems high. I have a evga 680 with 2gb running at 1098/1552/1163 and while its nice I moved up from a gtx 575 and quite honestly its not that big a difference. Yeah obviously its better but not blow-you-away or anything like that. imo its way, way, way better having a good SSD and tons of memory than a over-the-top GPU, I put in 32GB of memory and a 240gb samsung. You can use junction in windows 8 (mklink in cmd prompt) to junction drives on/off your C: drive.
I'd also get a 2 or 3TB drive instead of 1tb, fewer hard drives in the machine the quieter it is.