Setting a new computer Mobos advise needed

You're seriously considering the Quad Royal?

Okay, ask yourself some serious questions about whether you're really going to buy 4 (!!!) graphics cards and then ask again.

You really need to post:

a) Budget

and

b) The rest of the specs for the proposed build


Quad Royal....what a joke.

Okay, so I'm guessing the budget is about a grand then?

First, motherboard, don't bother with more than £120.

2GB DDR2 (2x1gb) starts at about £98, not £200.

This leaves you with 180 quid to distribute around the rest of the build. I'd reccommend spending a little bit more on the CPU, as a £300 graphics board is still about the best you can get. Don't bother with SLi setups, though.

Where are you buying from?

Asus' Pentium boards have a very good reputation, so I'm sure a top-line one like the P5ND2 will surely be a good board.

I will say to you not to buy it to allow yourself upgrade path to SLi - because SLi really isn't a sensible upgrade path.

Buying a 7900 instead of 2x7800, for example, would be a much better and cheaper idea than going for the SLi setup. If budget is important at all then steer well clear of SLi, only should it be considered if you have all the very best components in every other area of your system that matter to you and still have budget left over.

As for nVidia vs ATi, the choice is really GeForce 7900 vs Radeon 1900, although to be perfectly honest there isn't a huge difference between the two. People say ATi plays better in Oblivion, if that makes a difference.

As for a CPU, the Pentium D 950 looks good and is within your budget.

Have you already decided on other components yet?

It all looks great so far. I'm a big fan of 250gb drives from a price/size/speed point of view, and also 16mb caches are a must IMO.

As far as RAM goes there are a couple of options.

Going with 2x1gb DDR2 is the smartest option here, so you can use dual channel and leaving another 2 slots free for the 4gb upgrade that Vista is going to want if you want to stay at the cutting edge.

On eBuyer, the two I would look at are the Corsair 1gb DDR2 module priced at £54 and the Crucial 1gb DDR2 module at £65. If you can stretch the budget there is OCZ 1gb DDR2 sticks for around £90 each (obviously going for a pair of any of these). If you plan to overclock the OCZ is probably the best option, as 'premium' RAM is a must, however if not the Crucial or Corsair modules will perform more than adequately.

If you really want to save money, the eBuyer extra-value RAM is priced at £46 - I've never had problems with it (and I've used it on a great many systems) but it's your call.