new build, hardware experts rejoice :)

[Knytestorme]

Yeah, had a read a read over all the anandtech reviews on cpu coolers and it seemed to be the best...though am also tempted by just going balls out and putting a Ninja B on it with 4 120mm fans in push-pull configuration with one set directing air from bottom to top (for the top case fan extraction) and the other two pulling from front to rear (for rear fan extraction).

That's actually how I'll likely go since I'm a little concerned the heatpipe on the 120 won't be heading directly to the side fan and if I'm going to do it then I may as well do it right.

Alternatively I'm considering Thermaltake Armor LCS Case with Liquid Cooling rather than the Antec 1200 and just having water cooling. Only dampener on that plan atm is there is no cooling block for the GX2's that I can find yet.

[Kopitar]

I've just put together a similar system (only 1 gx2 and 2 500gb drives) , have not tried anything with it yet as i just assembled and loaded OS on it, but it should handle AoC much better than my old system.

[Manylines]

" * Will the 2 GX2's run 4 monitors without a drop in fps when not in SLI?"

I just bought the GeForce 9800 GX2, and it works great if you put all your wow's on one screen. But when you enable the second display and move one wow to the new dispay, it is utter crap. Fps drops insanely on all the wow instances. This is in Vista btw, and there is no Horizontal span avialable in Vista. (should not be needed either). I ended up going back to my radeon 1900, works a lot better.. Sadly.

[Knytestorme]

Well I did the build this weekend, the only difference was I decided to wait on the GX2's after reading an article on tomshardware.com about whether cpu or graphics card upgardes give better bang for the buck...seems that at 22" res the difference between a 9800GTX SLI and GX2 Quad SLI is non-existant so decided to see how the 7800GTX's I had went first.

Came to 2 conclussions:

1. Putting one monitor on one card and the other on the other with the cards not in SLI gave horrendous framerates...single digit fps on all accounts.
2. Putting two monitors on one card with SLI disabled gave acceptable framerate but lower than I was getting on a single 7800 with 4Gb of ram under XP32 (eg all screens getting ~15fps under Vista64, main getting ~30 and background at around 15 under XP32)

I'm not sure if taking the SLI bridge off the 2 cards will make a difference, but at this stage I'm still undecided which way to go for graphics card upgrade. Going with 2 GX2's will provide no real benefit to other games over 2 9800GTX's when in SLI, but I have a feeling a GX2 will provide better framerates than a GTX while multiboxing on a single card.