Setting out to make my first rig.

[s0lesurviv0r]

So I've been looking around on Newegg for a while and finally decided to put together a rig.  These are the parts that I have coming:

Case

Antec Three Hundred ATX Mid Tower

Mobo

Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 Nvidia nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX

Processor

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Brisbane 2.5GHz

RAM

Patriot Viper 4GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

Power Supply

Silverstone OP650 650W 12V 2.2 &EPS12V

Graphics

2x Palit GeForce 8800gt Sonic 1GB

Drives

Western Digital Caviar RE WD2500YS 250GB 7200 RPM Sata3.0Gb/s
Lite-On SATA Blu-ray drive
LG Super Multi Blu-ray burner SATA

OS

Vista Ultimate (64-bit)

I also tossed in a Zalman 110mm 2 ball CPU cooler and a 120mm case fan.  I shall be dining upon ramen for many nights.

How's it looking, decent? Moderate? Or utter fail?

[Ceceil Felias]

Get the M2N32-SLI instead of just the M2N. I only have the M2N myself because I had ordered while half-asleep and intended to get the 32 instead, and I decided not to bother RMAing because SLI wasn't high on my priorities.

[Vandamguy]

just a heads up: vista doesn't do SLI very well at all.
im running home premium 32 bit and have 2 8800 GTX's

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/vandamg...1598.phtml

here's a failblog post that i made with details on the performance gains of SLI and not SLI in Crysis

tl;dr ?
here's the bottom line

Single Card, High, 169.01 (driver version)
Average FPS: 28.25
Average FPS: 29.87
Double Card, High, 169.01
Average FPS: 34.24
Average FPS: 41.01

and i wouldn't reccomend an 8800 gt in a single card setup.

try and find a geforce gtx 260($400), they were JUST made available to the market yesterday. one of those cards is comparable to having an 8800 GTX in SLI. without spending 1,200 dollars and increasing your thermals.

If vista l2p with SLI in the future you can always upgrade to  two 260's which would be sex. 

[IdiotWithGuns]

I would reccomend going with a different ram tho.  Get DDR2 8500 once you install it you can run it in DDR2 1066.
This will give you great performance as far as ram goes.  Check M2N-SLI if there are any new Bios updates when switching to ddr2 1066, since some bios tend to freeze up when doing this mod.

[Wedge]

Seems like a kind of slow cpu for everything else you were gonna put in.  I just got  a system with a 6000+ and that thing is only $100...