I haven't opened the boxes yet, but I have an eVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and two 9800 GX2s sitting in the cube. As I hinted a while ago, this was the stuff that we originally planned on. Alas, nVidia pushed the NDA back two weeks till today, so I wasn't sure we would have the parts in time.

Even so, I would've stuck with the D5400XS and ATI 3870 X2's (which completely rock for the price) if it weren't for the issues I encountered. I'm of course assuming my road will be a little less rocky with these components. One thing you can count on--you'll hear about it either way.

More later.

Cheers, Jon

P.S. The cards are now separated into the 1st and 3rd slots.

After careful consideration. I decided on using RAID 5 instead of 0 with the four 15K drives. In case you're not familiar, RAID 0 is simple striping (dividing the data and distributing it evenly across the drives) and provides very good read and write performance. But there's absolutely no fault tolerance, i.e., if one drive goes--your data is history.

RAID 5 on the other hand offers superb read speed, but isn't quite as hot as RAID 0 in the write department. It does, however, offer fault tolerance so if a drive dies, you can still rebuild the array (a pretty slow process) and get your data back. Of course you lose some space to the parity information which is distributed across the drives but there's still about 900GB of storage. Since the 15k drives are actually secondary storage on this rig, I figure RAID 5 was appropriate.

It's probably a good thing I decided on RAID 5 anyway. Building the array, the routine blew up at about the 63% mark. I've verified the media integrity of each drive (which took about 4 hours), upgraded the BIOS on the 3405 card and checked the cable. All seems hunky-dory so I'll set it in motion once more and let you know how it goes.

If you thought that 100 hours total labor was sketchy... I'm at about thirty and the thing isn't even in the case. By the way, that doesn't include all the time folks spent researching and communicating over this thing.

Diamond has thoughtfully donated two Radeon 3870 X2 cards which I requested after hearing that the ATI cards may play better in multiple monitor setups.

I'll be checking them and the multiple monitor setup for the first time later today. Alas, there's probably no chance they'll be in the case when it ships because, believe it or not, they're too inexpensive. That's right, too much bang for the buck. We can't have the retail value of the Dream PC fall below the level we announced it at. $30,600 or so.

That's life on the dreamy bleeding edge--for now. I'm about to install Vista 64 and some apps, so I'll be in touch about that as well.

Happy computing! Jon