Hey.
First post so be nice

I'm seriously thinking about building my own PC. My friend built his own and he suggested that I do the same. So I was wondering if you guys have any ideas about the kind of hardware I should be getting. Right now I'm thinking some-kind of SLI / Crossfire setup since I'm a bit of a gamer. Feel free to get technical since I *think* I know the basics. So if any of you out there have any tips or ideas feel free to post them here. Thanks

Here's what I've got so far:

ASUS nVidia nForce4 SLI ATX
2 x BFG Tech Geforce 7900GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card
Cosair 2GB's of RAM
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS SB0350 7.1
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 2000MHz HT

A bit pricey but I'm saving alot of money building it myself. Any thoughts on these choices?

Looks rather nice.
Especially the 2Gb memory, you should never have memory problem with that!
Just be sure that the games you want to play will work on an AMD Athlon 64 .
Yordan

Looks like a great setup. I'm not much of an expert on pc spec's but I know that one blows mine away. I'm not familiar with AMD so I don't know it's capabilities, but I hear it's the same almost (or better) than most pentiums. I have 1 gig of ram and it does fine, but I would imagine that expensie memory would help a lot. Also in the future I see requirements coming steeper and steeper with all the graphics. Which your 2x vid cards should provide. I don't have a pci express slot because I got my pc just before the hype, but if I was a big gamer I guess that's the way I would be heading.

I heard something about a new AGP slot coming up soon, if it's not already. Suppose to be faster than pci-express.

All in all, with that you should be able to play almost any game. Just get you a whopper of a hard drive to go with it to hold your games. It should hold you for a few years fairly easy. If you can afford it then why not I guess. If you wanted to talk price/option ratios that would be different.

You have a very nice start there, better then mine. Although I must say that you MUST remember that for that set up you will need a monsterous power supply.

I would suggest an Antec power supply that is rated at 450 watts or better. Also don't forget about your cooling needs. For the processor I would suggest a 3rd party heat sink like the Thermaltake Big Typhoon - CL-P0114.

Also you will need a case that has enough fan mounts to move large amounts of air in and out. If your really wanting to keep your system as cool as possible you might want to look into liquid cooling for your cpu, ram, and video. There are prebuilt liquid cooling systems for the extream computer.

All in all I must say that your well on your way to a monster gaming machine but like I said don't forget the cooling, case, and power supply. Also I would suggest going pure SATA and leave the IDE hard drives alone. A super fast CPU and super fast ram are usless unless your Hard drives can supply them data at decent speeds as well.

2 x BFG ... you are saying you have two graphic cards working together to double the graphics power?

If it is, how is possible to do that? It is possible to do with any graphics card? or must be a special one?

I am VERY interested in this issue.

Thanks to all.

In order to run 2 video cards in tandum on a single motherboard you have to have a motherboard that can handle it. In his case he has to have and SLI enabled motherboard to run his 2 Nvidia based cards. If he was running ATI based cards he would need a XFire enabled motherboard, and XFire cards. If you want more info I can get you more, or you can check out Nvidias website or ATI's website.

I will be grateful if you can show me more about this.
If I buy a SLI motherboard I could put two nVidia graphic cards working together? or the graphic cards need to be special ones? The graphic cards could be AGP or need to be PCI ?

I'll appreciate if you can give me some example to understand it better.

I guess it's a feature which needs additional sofware and drivers, you should rather have a look at nVidia site.
I know that some Nvidia cards allow several cards to work at the same time under Linux, providing you have the corresponding drivers and X-Windows settings, which is sometimes not so obvious.
Regards
Yordan

To run Dual NVidia cards they need to have the SAME BIOS and other things. To really understand how to do it check out the NVidia website or a card manufacturers website. I personally would go with ATI cards myself but I've been a ATI "fanboy" for a long time.