PLEASE ADVISE ON CONFIGURATION

Only go with 4GB of RAM if you're planning on getting 64-bit Vista, and only go with 64-bit Vista if you have (or think you might need in the future) 64-bit apps and/or all your peripherals have 64-bit drivers available.  With 2x768MB video cards, you'll only be able to use at most 2.5GB of system RAM in a 32-bit OS.  What a lot of people have done here is get 32-bit Vista and 2GB of RAM, with the intention of adding 2 more GB of RAM themselves when/if they upgrade to Vista64.

More smaller drives will give you better performance than one large drive (unless that one large drive is actually a RAID set).

As far as liquid cooling, it's only really useful for heavy overclocking. If you're not going to overclock your video cards, you don't need them to be liquid cooled (especially with a case like the Ultra or Extreme that has lots of fans/good airflow).  If you're not going to overclock your CPU (or are only going to overclock it slightly), then stage 3 air cooling is sufficient.  If you are going to overclock your CPU to the maximum stable level, then liquid cooling makes sense.  Some people also think liquid cooling is quieter and choose it for that reason, and still others think it just looks cool (no pun intended).

One thing to bear in mind also is, at the moment, having two 8800 Ultras in SLI mode won't buy you a noticeable framerate increase with any of today's games unless you're playing in the very high resolutions that are only available on 22" monitors (or larger).  I'm not trying to talk you out of the 2x8800 Ultras if you have a smaller monitor than 22", but just know that if you don't have a monitor capable of 1600x1200 or higher natively, you could get 1 video card now and one later (and potentially cheaper) when you run across a game that demands more power than a single video card can deliver at the resolution you want to play at.  On the other hand, you never know what kind of video card horsepower will be needed for games that will be coming out in the next 1-3 years even at more standard resolutions, so SLI Ultras would "future-proof" your system a bit.

Hope this helps!

No problem.  To clarify my statement about drives, two separate 10k RPM drives should give you the best performance, provided you put your OS/pagefile on one and your games on another.

There's a thread around these forums somewhere where folks are talking about a three 10k RPM drive setup (one for OS, one for pagefile, and one for games) but the performance increase of that setup vs. two 10k drives is theoretical and (if it's even noticeable) is probably very small.

If you plan to have a drive that's used just for storage (tv/movies, mp3s, photos, etc.) the size and speed won't really matter.

Agadou, you should also invest in one of those fatal1ty soundcards.  you get an extra 64MB RAM.  Kelly suggested it to me, there is no way you could go wrong with it, but it costs alittle extra.

Wow, you guys on the forums are great! Making my job way too easy.
Definitely go with the Fatality sound card if you can afford it, the performance jump from even the xtreme gamer is impressive. As for the liquid cooling, it can be a bit bothersome to refill but you only have to add liquid once a year. Depending on local climate of course. And the advice on RAM, spot on. I really have nothing to add there. Otherwise the build looks good. Give us a call if you want to run through the config with a representative.

you should really call them for that hehe.

Edited by Bigdog - 10 Oct 2007 at 2:53pm

Great, so what do you recommend for capturing videos? Can you explain the problem with the optical drives, I'm confused?

also, if your cooling springs a leak. ut oh... pain.