No, Intel chipsets and ATI cards work fine together. If there's any pairing "rules" you want to stick to these days, it's to pair NVidia chipsets with NVidia cards, if you have intentions of doing SLI.
<S>
On Friday (about 5 mins before FSO launch - sigh), my graphics card crapped out taking the primary PCIe-16 slot on my motherboard with it (actually - it could have been the other way around). Anyway, long and short of it was I spent Saturday morning making an unexpected trip to the local toy store (AKA Fry's).
After a few false starts due the rushed need to get back up and running and lack of the usual research, I ended up with:
Core i7 860 ($280)
Asus P7P55D Pro Motherboard ($180)
4GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600 ($140)
XFX 5850 Black Edition ($355)
WD Caviar 1TB Disk ($109)
Win 7 Home Premium Upgrade ($119)
Total $1183
Those prices are more less on a par with NewEgg which is usually about as cheap as I can find, so I'm thinking ZetaNine's price for the Dell is not that bad given they are throwing in more memory, a better graphics card, case, dvd drives, fans, monitor etc etc. Plus he doesn't have a bunch of skinned knuckles now.