Just Built this System.. Thoughts?

Did you remember to set the correct voltage and latencies in bios? Also, quite a few boards become unstable during overclocks with all four dimm slots in use.




Looks like a very nice gaming setup, though I would like to know what CPU and motherboard you have chosen, and how far you can push it to utilize the power of those videocards.
Also, as this seems to be strictly a gaming PC, why did you opt for 8 GBs of ram? The money spent on that extra set of ram could have been spent getting an i5 750 and motherboard, and given you a better performance.




I don't think anyone many would be willing to spend the money an i7 975 costs, when you can buy an i5 750 for $200 or an i7 920 for $290 and overclock it on air to at least 4 GHz, so I don't really understand that comparison.




It looks like a very nice gaming setup, but you are going to take quite a hit selling off those GTX 295 in a few months I would imagine, certainly not the way I would go about it, but then again, not my money, so if you're pleased with this setup, enjoy.  

You kind of contradicted yourself there. Because it sure looks to me like you're going to be spending well over $2,000 on video cards alone, most of which will be wasted.

You do realize that crossfire/SLI on cards that powerful is just going to make your CPU into a giant bottleneck, right? For that matter, even a single GTX 295 is going to be pushing the limit of the most powerful AMD quad cores.

Not to mention that out of the $1,000+ you spent on the GTX 295's, you'll be lucky to get half back, and then you'll turn around and spend another $1,000-plus on two more graphics cards that will be overkill. I don't support that idea at all.

Asus M4n82 Deluxe Motherboard and two Evga COOP 295's I paid $400 each for.

I think I can get about $300-400 on resale right b4 the G100's come out..

I have always been an AMD guy my whole life and that's why I wouldn't dish out the extra cash for an Intel system..

What do we mean with the bottleneck?

It means the video cards are going to be far more powerful than the CPU. So essentially, they will not run at full performance because the system will be limited by what the CPU can do.

The GTX 295 is a very powerful card, and two of them in SLI are going to be incredibly powerful. When the Fermi cards come out, they're supposedly going to be roughly in the performance range of an ATI 5970, and I am not sure if there's a CPU on the market that could keep up with two of those.

At any rate, there's nothing wrong with AMD processors, but the bottom line right now is that Intel's i7 chips are significantly more powerful than AMD's best -- and no AMD chip is going to keep up with that level of GPU power. I can't see buying two of those cards, period, unless you have a huge -- and I mean HUGE -- monitor or multi-monitor setup