Comp parts - Any pointers?

[VSMIT]

Regarding the wishlist, it looks good, go with it when you're ready.

As for the video cards, both of the manufacturers you've got there are proven nVidia card manufacturers.  Just remember that if you want to do SLI, you'll have to hunt down a second 8800GTX.

[Azlan]

The Quality Control on the Crosshair II has been rather poor.  My really well off friend has had to RMA 3 of these boards for various problems. 

The recent ones have been getting better, so hopefully you will get one from a recent production run.

I myself have had to RMA 2 780 chipset boards because the 125W Phenoms keep blowing the VRs on the MOBO. 

[RobbieThe1st]

Regarding the wishlist, it looks good, go with it when you're ready.

As for the video cards, both of the manufacturers you've got there are proven nVidia card manufacturers. 

Thats great!

Just remember that if you want to do SLI, you'll have to hunt down a second 8800GTX.

I figured that out yesterday - Before that I thought that you could couple any two SLI-enabled cards together(although you might not get any better performance than 2X the lowest card, or something like that). Still, it looks like the 8800GTX would be a nice workhorse card - and supports the CUDA stuff in case I run across programs that can utilize it.


-RobbieThe1st

[VSMIT]

With ATI and Crossfire, you can use two different cards as long as they're the same GPU.  As such, you can Crossfire an HD4850 with an HD4870 with an HD4870x2 if you wanted to, since they all use the same GPU.  Previously, you were able to use two completely different cards, but that's been done away with as it required basically a proprietary Crossfire card.

As far as I know, SLI has always been two identical cards.