I put together my new PC last weekend, and have it almost finished up today. Hardware wise, it's all done. Now I just get to work on the case and lighting etc. Here are the important specs:

Xfx 790i Mobo

QX6850

2 x BFG 9800GTXs for SLI

Corsair XMS3 PC10600

Tagan 1100w BZ Series PSU - ESA certified

2 x WD 140gig 10,000RPM Raptors in Mirrored Raid1 (I think mirrored is Raid1 at least.. not 100% sure)

LiteOn BR/DVD reader

ZEROtherm Nirvana air cooler

X-Fi "fatality" branded (groan) Sound Card

New G15 keyboard (the orange one)

I went with a Danger Den Water Box, but quickly found out that was a mistake. There is no 5.25" bay, and the distance between mobo tray and lid is not high enough for my air cooler to fit. I realize it's a "Water Box" and all, so going with air cooling seems foolish, but my intent was to go with air cooling for awhile, then upgrade to water later on down the road. Oops. Now I have to sell it off and get a different case. Hopefuly Danger Den pulls through and does a custom Water Box Plus (5.25" on these) with an extra inch of clearance for the lid. That'd be just about perfect. Until that happens I am going to have PC guts all over the place "torture rack" s.t.y.l.e. in the current case.

Also, I started off with 2 BFG 8800GTS OC 512MB cards, but after having them in for 3 days I woke up on monday to find out the 9800GTX cards were released. I quickly put the GTS cards up on Ebay and ordered two GTX cards. I ended up turning a profit on the GTS cards, of about $15 each, which was nice. However, the GTX cards made my 3dMark06 score go from 16500 to 16595. A grand total of 95 points. I wish I had done some more in-game testing with the GTS cards to know for sure how much of a difference these GTX's are really going to give me. Synthetic benchmarks don't really tell you a whole lot. Especially at the end of their life-cycle when CPU becomes more important with them.

Also, I started out with a Q6600 that my fiance was going to sell me for $150. She won a QX6850 at PDXLAN (I blogged a bit about it) and had installed it in her PC. She was getting a very minimal performance gain from it since her mobo is stuck at 1066 FSB vs. the Qx6850's 1333 FSB rating. With the Q6600 and 2 GTS cards I got a 12169 on 3dMark06. After swapping CPU's it jumped over 4k to the 16500 score. I was pretty stunned. She was too, so she told me to keep it. Yay me! (love that woman) If I ever sell it though, she gets the dough. I'll just have to burn a hole in it before it comes to that. ;)

The PC itself was actually the most difficult build I have ever had. I've built a LOT of PC's over the years, and this one easily had the most problems. I'll make a post about it this weekend probably. But to leave you with a hint of how things went... the last problem I had was solved by renaming a file from idecio.dll to Idecio.dll. Yes, just one capital letter fixed it. Don't ask, cause I don't know.

EDIT: I foolishly went through my Photobucket and "cleaned" out pics. One of the pics I deleted was the one I had linked above showing the rig in the first case I bought from DangerDen. Ooops. I have it now linked to a top down shot of the 9800GTX on the board with an 8800GTS that I took to show the comparison length of the cards. Here is a link to what it looks like now in the new case. Wires are still a mess, but I have a sleaving kit ready to go. I've never done sleaving before so this should be a learning experience.