2K system build

What are you going to be using it for? Gaming? Have you decided on AMD or intel for a cpu? AMD or Nvidia for a gpu? If you could give some basics on what you have decided on already, we would be able to help you better.

For crossfire, look into the x38 or x48 motherboards. For a gpu, you have a couple options. Either a 4850, 4870 (or 2 of those in crossfire) or a 4870x2. It depends on how much you want to spend and what games you are playing. The RAM depends on what cpu and motherboard you get, but either 800mhz or 1066mhz most likely.

If you live in the U.S., look at this Newegg search: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 36%3A16983
It's showing all dual-socket server motherboards with >2 pci-express slots. There looks to be a wide selection there.

Hope that helps.

Ahhh, thank you VERY much! Newbie question since this is my first build. How can you tell if a motherboard has sli or crossfire support? Cuz all I can do right now is look for the 2 PCI express x16 slots and whether the motherboard is x48 or p45 chipset. Sometimes when these requirements are met the board is sli or crossfire, other times it isn't. Is there something i'm missing?

SLI boards are either packed with an nvidia chipset (780i or 790i), or they advertise SLI support (Skulltrail boards). Otherwise as long as it has 2 PCI-E slots it will have crossfire support.

To be quite honest, if you do get the stuff I suggested for your first build (even though this applies for any build), then just make sure you know what you're about to do on each step, don't apply excessive force anywhere, and don't panic if things aren't booting, because you might have forgotten something as simple as a power cable or a RAM stick that isn't seated correctly, that's the kind of stuff that happens to everyone regardless of how experienced you are.

At least on the server side I would assume so. I don't think it holds true for the desktop side though. (Forgot to mention crossfire doesn't work on nvidia boards, nvidia locked them from doing so)

However one thing I have to warn you about, while intel chipsets are very good performers and stable, the opposite goes to nvidia, it was bad with the 680i chipsets and just got worse with the 780i and 790i. I hold them in such bad regard that I would much rather strap dog fecal matter to a motherboard than use an nvidia chipset. (Only decent one is the Intel Skulltrail that supports both crossfire and SLI, but that'll run around $600-650 a pop)

Well anyway, good thing that Ati is on top of nvidia at the moment, that way people don't have any reason to get those dreaded nvidia based boards.