SLI gaming rig please Help!!

[mattrick]

I wanna build an SLI rig, and maybe try a RAID 0 setup as well. I dont have a budget..... but I dont want to go crazy and spend a million bucks either. So far this is what I have thats around my spending area...

Antec Nine Hundred Case with Side Window (have in hand)

Kingwin ABT-600MA1 600W Power Supply (have in hand)

Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz

Asus P5N32-E nForce 680i SLI Chipset LGA775 FSB1333

OCZ SLI-Ready Edition Dual Channel 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz Memory (maybe 4 gigs?)

GeForce 8600 GT X2 (have in hand)

Creative Labs X-FI XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro 24-BIT PCI Sound Card

Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM X2 (will be my RAID 0)

OS - Vista (32 bit or 64 bit?)

This will be my first complete build. Ive done the easy stuff like replace ram, hdd, video cards etc etc. Never setup an SLI (it seems rather plug and play), never OC'ed anything, and never setup a RAID 0 (or any RAID for that matter). I really wanted to try an SLI so I got some lower end video cards that i may upgrade later. If you guys could look this setup over and approve/disapprove, and tell me if its gonna work or if I need to do something different or maybe change some things.

RAID 0 question.......Can I have the 2 wd raptors set to RAID 0, then have an additonal say.... 400 gig HDD by itself as back up for my RAID 0? And should I put my OS on the RAID or the back up? Oh yeah, and is RAID 0 Hard to setup?


Anyways, thanks a million in advance and hope to hear from you guys soon!

 

[itotallybelieveyou]

uhhhhhhhh.... SLI 8600GT is worse thing you could possible do. Should've jsut gotten a 8800GT. Vista 64 with 4 gigs. rest all it' fine

 

[mattrick]

whats so bad about 8600, i got em for really cheap btw cause my friend had em lying around. I paid like right under 200 for both.... I dunno should I scrap em?

 

[dmroeder]

I wouldn't bother with RAID 0 either. Just buy 1 raptor and 1 large hard drive. Put your O/S and such on the raptor and all your files on the other drive.

I think the whole SLI thing is overrated also.

 

[Totenkampf]

If you go out and look at the benchmarks, SLI kills on high resolutions but performs worse at 640x480. I am looking to set up a similar system with 8800GT in SLI (one of these prolly outperfomrs 2x 8600GT especially if they are the older DDR2 models that I just sold) and have read the X-Fi cards have problems with Vista. THis soundcard was recommended to me for use with Vista Ultimate x64:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829270003