Right guys, about to get on with it, but through i would give u a bit more detail on the events of yesterday - was in a bit of a hurry last night when i posted.
Had many little niggles with this build (such as the Galaxy being 1cm 2 long due to my res being in the way! grrrr) which is why its taken a bit longer than normal. I had 3 main issues with setting up the board.
1) - this is the main one, and a big flaw in the layout of the board imo. The molex socket for SLI power is too near the slot above it, so when you install a 2nd card (8800GTX at least anyways) the cooler hits the molex when its plugged in. Its virtually impossible to fit the card in the bottom PCI-E slot as a result. After a good lot of 'persuasion' I did just about squeeze it in, but this really is not ideal. I really cant believe that no one at abit tested this, as the power input is only really necessary if you use SLI, but it makes it really really difficult to use SLI with it plugged in!
2) - CPU Fan detect failsafe. This is important for anyone on watercooling. I decided to go straight to water, i had my loop (just CPU atm, cant get hold of blocks for the 8800's atm) ready, and my storm was begging to be used, so I stuck it straight on. Anyhow, at default bios settings the board would just powerup for a few seconds and then shut down. Thank god for the LCD display, as it indicated it was a 'CPU fan Error'. Anyway the only way I could get it to boot up was by plugging in my stock CPU fan to get into bios and change the fan detection settings.
3) - Checksum Error - As i indicated above, I had a checksum error the first time I managed to get the board to post. It could well be just the Cellshock thats affected by this. I had a feeling it wasnt using enough voltage. Managed to get into bios and sure enough it was only feeding it 1.8v. Upped it to 2.2v and problem gone.
System was then fine even got it too boot into my old windows install on one card. My current prob is that adding a 2nd card seems to stop the system booting at all. rather annoyingly its also very difficult to read the error code display with a 2nd GTX in the way! Anyhow thats what Im working on right now. Hopefully I'll get it sorted pretty quick.