Need advice on building a system

Hey guys. I have a guy who is a big hardware techie and will build me a system out of whatever I give him. Here are the components I currently have:

(1) Intel QX6700 Quad Core CPU
(2) BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB vid cards
(2) 30" apple monitors

I had a machine built by a guy using the pieces I stated above, but I dont know if its the hardware configuration I chose (naively), or faulty hardware itself, but the thing SUCKED. These pieces I listed above are all I want to salvage from it (because I know for a fact they are 100% operational).

I basically need help deisgning a kick-ass machine surrounding those centerpieces. I am pretty much a newbie when it comes to hardware, so I don't know what motherboard goes with the CPU I have, what ram is the best, what cooling mechanism/case is the best (and I can tell you those two vid cards on top of the quad core generates some SERIOUS heat). Price is really not an object, as I can expense this all out through my company.

I am a software developer, so it needs to have some horsepower, but I'm also a gamer and a graphic designer (thus the GPU horsepower).

Please give me some advice! I am probably going to order the parts from newegg based on the help I get from this forum this week, so providing part numbers or specific model numbers will help me out a great deal!

Oh, the only other thing is the OS, I plan on running 64-bit vista ultimate. I was running 32-bit vista on the machine these parts were taken from, and it just didnt utilize the ram very well.

Thanks!

Sorry, 'sucked' was vague. The aforementioned now-deconstructed machine had the following components :
The CPU, vid cards, and monitors I mentioned up top.
4 1GB Crucial 240-pin DDR2 DIMMs @667
1 500GB WD Caviar HD @7200rpm
ANTEC TP3-550W Truepower power supply
CoolerMaster Mystique case
ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium mobo

By 'sucked' I mean:
1) if I put anymore than 2 of the DIMM chips on the motherboard, the whole system slows to a completel crawl. Four completely freezes it, three makes it super slow

2) Whenever I had to reboot, it took 4-6 times of it freezing on the "progress bar" loading screen for vista before it actually loaded the drivers properly

3) One of the vid cards already has malfunctioned and taken out my install of vista with it (completely corrupted driver cache, goes into a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA BSoD reboot loop

4) Hibernate causes the whole thing to freeze, and reset all my graphics drivers to factory settings

Alot of these could be just distilled down to "Vista blows", but I'm running Vista 32-bit on an AMD Core Duo machine I keep as a backup and its never so much as screwed up once.