New System Thoughts

I recently obtained a 30" monitor only to find out that my current 7950GTX 1gb dual GPU video card does not support dual link DVI-D. I was not pleased. I am now in the process of putting together a new computer and wanted some recommendations and thoughts on what I have configured. Any input is greatly apprecaited.

Motherboard: EVGA 780i SLI A1
Processor: Intel Q6600
Memory: XMS2 Corsair DDR2 800 2x2
Power supply: Quattro TPQ 1000
Video card: dual 8800gt

If you are buying a new video card, then you should seriously consider getting out of SLI chipsets.

nVidia seems to be having problems in the chipset area right now.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] rts-choose

The chipsets themselves seem prone to crashing more than Intel chipsets. This has been going on for some time, but is not well documented or understood. Microsoft released a pie chart a while back, based on info gathered from their crash report utility, that had nVidia as the lead cause of crashes in Vista.

As far as I know it's not huge. Any system is going to crash at some point... that's just the nature of complexity. The SLI chipsets seem to have more issues, so we always recommend Intel chipsets for single card configs, and crossfire whenever possible.

Rumors are still floating around that nVidia will exit the motherboard chipset business completely in the spring.

Sorry for double post, Proximon beat me to the punch

There are many x58 boards. You should link the one you are talking about.

That board should have full x16 bandwidth for all 3 PCI-E slots. It's very nice.

This one is better:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131346
Why? Because of the spacing between the first and second PCI-E slots.