Just a couple of things you need to keep in mind...
- New graphics cards like the 8800 series need a LOT of juice. If you're getting two of them, you should get a power supply capable of delivering at least 700 watts.
- Unless you're playing games at 1920x1200 or higher, SLI is a total waste; the second card will sit idle most of the time.
- If you're buying it for gaming, get 32-bit XP. Your games will run faster and with a much better compatibility rate on XP (this is not anecdotal; there have been lots of benchmarks to confirm this). The only real drawback with XP is the amount of addressable RAM. Basically, XP can only understand 4gigs, total. From that, you lose 512meg for mandatory swap space, plus all of your video ram (TWICE if you have SLI). My gaming machine has 4gigs of RAM and two 768 meg 8800 GTX's, so I only get around 2.5 gigs of free RAM in XP. 64-bit XP will give you acesss to all your RAM but run games in a software emulation layer which is painfully slow (this is why Intel abandoned the Itanium). In any case, the 64 bit version of XP has been discontinued by MS.
As far as brands go, everyone has their favorites and personal pet peeves. Sometimes I build my machines, sometimes I buy a brand name; it all depends on the situation. Over the yeas I seem to have ended up owning a whole lot of Dells. This was never by design; they just seem to either have the configuration that I'm looking for or they were the best bang for the buck.
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