Will Phenom 9950 BE bottleneck 3-way SLI

yes

any processor thats not over like 5 ghz will

Dont forget to factor another possible bottlenecks, runing operations (icq, msn, etc), hdd itself and its defrang, its over 40% full? is it not in RAID 0?

thats the main reasons of bottles, also same thing with cpus, u need at least 3.6 ghz runing 1/1 ratio with ram, anything else creates bottlenecks.

same rule apply for anything, including sound card itself (depending on the type of PCI connection).

fianlly, plz never go 3 way anything apart form x2 cards.

for any more info aobut reasons why 3 way something dont work, ask me if u need reasons.

too late to get GTX 280's I already have 3 GTX 260 in Tri SLi.
Only reason I have 3 is cause I got a killer deal on them. $550 no tax's straight up for all three.
My 3DMark Vantage score is High 15215. i don't play at crazy resolutions I play at 1680x1050 and like I said I only got the cards cause it was cheaper then one GTX 280 itself

Tri-SLI does scale quite well with enough CPU horsepower. The Phenom probably doesn't have quite enough. I'd aim for a higher overclock if you can. Air cooling is probably putting anything beyond 3.5-3.6GHz out of your range.

Get rid of the Xigmatek S1284 and buy the S1283 it cools much better, around 5c, since the extra pipe actually lessens the contact with the CPU thanks to the placement. If you want a good beginner watercooling kit, then look at the Swiftech H20-220, it is the only retail watercooling kit worth it:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6835108105

Another way to lessen the bottleneck on the cards is to buy a new 1920x1200 res monitor, it will be less CPU dependent.

No, but he will feel better at night when his frames barely drop and he has a bigger monitor. Without getting a new CPU and motherboard I can't see him doing much else... even with watercooling which is likely to go VERY wrong.

^ Heh, called the law of diminishing returns pal.