Hey all, I'm quite new here to the TG forums, as well as to the building scene, and thought I'd ask around in hopes of gaining advice from more experienced builders. I'm really interested in computers, and thought this would be a good project to "jump start" me into the tech world. My friend who was originally going to help me just left to Japan, and so I'm feeling a little apprehensive about doing everything without any guidance. My budget's around $2500 and I'll be using my rig for gaming, multimedia, and just every day application. I wanted 2 video cards so I could run 3 monitors total since that's what my friend's set up was, and I found it hard to move back to just 1. I don't know much about SLI'ing these new video cards, or SLI in general, but I thought it was the best choice in terms of 3 monitors and video processing power (and kinda cool too ). Also, I thought the HDPC features were kinda interesting for future proofing. Idk if the heating and other complications outweigh this, but I figured that I'd just use EVGA's upgrade process after 3 months if I needed better solutions to bigger, faster cards. Also, I have little idea as to how RAID hdd's work, but I read that RAIDing 2 7200's/16 mb cache was plenty fast as an alternative to 2 10k's, and that's what I intended to do. However, it looked like jumping from a 250 gig to a 320 was only ~$10 more from the Seagate drives, which was the size my storage drives were also planned to be. It seems rather awkward to have two exact same drives running as OS AND storage, but the price differences didn't seem all too great to really change. Reviews on the larger SATA drives seemed to say that they were really noisy and clunky compared to the 320 Seagate's, so idk, I guess I figured I'd just buy 2 of the 320's and put them together instead of a 500 gig or something. Maybe it was a bad idea, not sure yet. I picked the BALLISTIX ram since they seemed highly overclockable, and I wanted to learn more about overclocking pretty much everything after I got the basics down. Hopefully the PSU is able to handle everything, because I already bought it. Also, I have yet to choose a case and processor. I was going for the OEM Athlon x2 6000 with the zalman cooler, but it always seems OOS. After looking around, I found that perhaps it isn't the best choice? Something about the ram only being clocked to ratios not able to hit true 800 mgz when multiplied? Dunno, but it seems like AMD is getting price cuts sooner than Intel, so maybe I should wait to buy anything until then. I'm not even sure about whether to go AMD or Intel, but it seemed like AMD was a lot cheaper, for slightly lesser performance that wouldn't be all too noticable. I was planning on going with 2 regular 17" monitors and a 20" widescreen in the middle if at all possible. What else..does anyone know if that floppy drive will work with Vista Ultimate? Idk, I'm kinda in a rush while writing this, so I'm pretty much listing out whatever questions come to mind. I'll probably add on later, but for now please tell me if this will work, and what components I should buy/RMA for price/performance in terms of my budget. I think AMD will probably be a lot cheaper in a few weeks, so keep that in mind. However, if there are better performing solutions for relatively the same price Intel side, I'll be willing to look into them even if they require OCing. Oh, and please remember that I really have no idea what I'm doing just yet, but am willing to learn . Thanks in advance for all the help.
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813131593
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16814130082 <----x2
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817371001
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820146565
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16821103116
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822148215 <----x4
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16824001095
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16827151136
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16829102002
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16832116215
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16835118020
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824224007 <---- x2
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813131593
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16814130082 <----x2
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817371001
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820146565
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16821103116
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822148215 <----x4
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16824001095
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16827151136
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16829102002
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16832116215
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16835118020
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824224007 <---- x2