New gaming rig - advice on gpu, ram and mobo plz

[Skidder]

Hi, this is my first post here.

My main rig is getting a bit long in the tooth as i have put all available money over the past couple of years into building a media (and TV gaming) pc for my living room.

It's been three years now since i built my main pc and i need to start again (it's an FX53, 1gig ram, 6800gt.)

I am planning to build a PC around a Q6600 and i want to run games on a 24inch monitor at native resolution wherever possible. I've been reading great things about 8800gt but Tom's Hardware tests showed that it will struggle with a 24inch monitor. I also fancy trying sli for the first time.

How about dual GTXs? the cheapest ones on OcUK are well priced. When do we think the new GTS will be on the scene and will it beat the GTX?

I tend to build a PC and then try to get a few years out of it without making major changes.

I am going to do a Vista build but fancy Vista 64 bit. Again have heard this works well for Crysis but are their decent sli drivers for it? (or any other drivers for that matter)

If i go 64 bit I would put in 4 gigs of ram.

So, sorry for the long post but my questions are:

Does it make sense to go GTX sli for good crysis performance (and obv other games) - i don't mind spending the money, the question is more will this be significantly better than dual 8800gts?

Does it make sense to go Vista 64 bit

What sli mobo should i go for?

What ram should i go for? (I do intend to overclock the Q6600)

It's not a money is no object build, more of a I've been working bloody hard and fancy treating myself build and will squeeze a couple of components out of father christmas (i.e. the wife.) So i don't want mega high end mobo and ram but do want performance and will pay a bit of a premium. So thanks for any advice

 

[Ben M]

for the gts question, nobody knows exactly what it's going to be capable of, but i think that it's expected to beat the GTX =o

 

[The Badger]

Whats your Budget?

 

[Owenb]

for the gts question, nobody knows exactly what it's going to be capable of, but i think that it's expected to fit in between the GT and the GTX

There is very little between a gtx and gt, 10%, so the new gts will probably be faster than the gtx.

Why do you think the GT will struggle with a 24 inch? Get a GT or 3870 and save the cash. GTX is only 10% faster, but nearly double the price. In 6-12 months time you can use the half of £400 you saved on SLI GTX to buy a card that will be faster than it anyway. If you really want SLI go with the GT's.

If you are going vista, and you might as well since MS will stop supporting the superior XP soon, then you might as well go 64bit- same cost and you can use 4GB ram- dirt cheap and vista is a ram *****

 

[Skidder]

Thanks for the responses so far.

The view on the GTX being able to handle crysis at higher resolutions better than the GT was based on reading this article:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Graphics_Cards-Geforce_8800GT-Crysis-DX10,review-29779.html


But i recognise that people are getting all sorts of different results. I get the impression though that the gap in performance is very narrow at normal resolutions but may be larger for high res and this demanding game. I hope that is wrong and if two GTs will run it at the native resolution on very high then i'm all over them. Based on that article it looks like one would struggle but may be it's wrong.

I haven't got a fixed budget, don't want to go mad but I am happy to spend a fair bit to get a system capable of playing games at the native res.

I want to build the system between Christmas and new year so if the GTS is out then may be that is the way forward.