nV6800 under 500.?

Okay, its time to build my system, but it seems impossible to buy a 6800 in the UK for under 500.

Whats with.? These things are like 500 USD anyways, so thats about 850-1000 USD equivilent. Rip-off.! :-O

Building :
(*) AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Socket 939 Retail Boxed (Venice)
(*) MSI K8N Neo4 Diamond nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (WiFi/Bluetooth)
(*) (Any cost effective) nV 6800 [with hopes of buying a 2nd in in the fall]
(*) Fastest OCZ/Corsair compatible memory.
(*) Thermaltake Shark Aluminium Silver Tower (No PSU)
(*) Thermaltake Silent Purepower 680W PSU ATX & EPS Retail Boxed

I'm pending my wage and the first two components are almost £350 on their own. Then about £160 for the last two parts... then they'll be keyboard, mouse, DualLayer DVD-RW.

Just bought a 32 inch LCD from LG aswell...

I've found a few on MicroDirect, the highest being :
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Produ [...] roupID=340

They have a "Dual 6600" (which im a bit skeptical about) :
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Produ [...] GroupID=27

My main worry was cards like this, with £500-600 price range :
http://www.gladiatorcomputers.com/ [...] SINX688UE5

Thanks for your imput guys, much appreciated.

I'm not to bothered if SLI doesn't catch on to all games, but the few games I have time to play; Americas Army (not supported.! :-o ), Splinter Cell, FarCry, World of Warcraft, Doom III, Max Payne II, Half-Life II... all support this feature and most upcomming games im after (battlefield 2, UT3.0 for example) will benefit from this feature.

So I feel pretty safe that SLI is a good path for upgrading.
Just a final question, what is a good price/performance level 6800Ultra card, and which vendor should I go for (e.g. MSI,Asus..?). Thank yoo.

[A long time ago I promised I would never buy another nVidia GPU again...how wrong I was. ]

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by dandeadstar on 05/21/05 01:20 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

EVGA gets my vote. Cheap and good.

Quite the opposite. SLI had a slow start because the driver had to adapt to the games individually. But in the future every game will be written with SLI in mind. The hardware will also further mature. So the cooperation between game, driver and hardware will only improve and multi-GPU systems will become quite common.

Anyway, for the moment, I'd still recommend a Geforce 6800 GT over two Geforce 6600 GT's. It has more raw processing power.

Aspect Ratio 16:9
Resolution 1366 x 768

So it says. :-/

Whats the difference, DVI-D, DVI-I .? :S