Core 2 + Sli question

[grimmysnr]

I have been doing alot of research lately about the new Core 2 Duo chips coming out but have noticed the scarcity of motherboards that support all the options i look for in my new board that i plan to purchase. Below in my signature are the specs of my current pc. I will be in dire need of an overhaul soon and i suppose i picked the absolute perfect time to do so. I am an avid gamer (if it werent for pc games i would just have a pocket pc or calculator becuz i suck at math) so performance is everything to me.

It seems the 975X chips will need flashing or upgrading and the P965 chips look to support conroe but what about the PCIe being x8 in SLI mode. The only chipset that seems to be awesome straight out the box are the nforce5 board from nvidia. I have done some googling and even visited the Nvidia site and it seems like these boards have been mainstream since January '05?? I have searched and searched and i cant find an nforce5 MB for the life of me. I cant even find a friggin release date.

What i also have seen with the current chipsets is once flashed and made Core 2 Duo ready, once you go to setup SLI it switches the PCIe bus to x8 in SLI mode. But these nforce5 boards are x16 in sli mode. Whats the deal?

Cliffnotes:

I want a board Conroe ready with PCIe x16 in SLI mode. I do not want x8. Will the 975X or P965 support this once flashed? With a setup like in my signature, what type of wattage will i be looking at for a conroe dual 7900GTX setup with raptors in raid-0?

I apologize for the long winded post, if you have read this far you are awesome!
thank you.

 

[allred]

I'm also in the market for a Nvidia nForce 590 motherboard, and I really can't find a lot of info on them. The best I've come up with is that they are spose to be avalible at conroes launch, with offerings from Asus and DFI for the 590, and more makes for the 570.

 

[sviola]

The reason you can't find any nforce 5 boards for intel, is that they're not available yet.

Seems that nvidia is working on making nforce 4 SLI boards work with Conroe (it seems they're having some trouble making it work correctly), try looking at your board manufacturer's site to see if any bios patches are available.

On the 975X running SLI, I'm sorry, you won't be able to find that, as Intel hasn't got the rights to use SLI in their chipsets. But you'll find Intel chips with ATI's xFire.