I upgraded myne in April, but I concentrated on INTEL/GF - so I'm not a profy in AMD/ATI. But, I would like to send you with your request to h... "Tom's hardware guide"
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... ,1965.html - about video card. The guys (at least in Russia) do serious checks and tests for hardware and give all the numbers in the article.
Concirning to SLI/Crossfire - are you going to by two graphical cards? Few advices based on all the articles I red about g-cards:
1) SLI/Crossfire - performs well on wide screens (more then 22'') and starting from 1600*1400 (or something like that). And no point to buy 2 cards of midprice range (like ATI3850/GF8600(9600)) as you can buy more powerfull card wich will perform better.
2) Analog of GF8800 GTS/GTX in ATI - are very powerfull but you can admit this on big monitors only, starting from 22''. On 17-19'' screens (1024*768/1280*1024) GT goes even faster then GTS.
3) do not take card with more then 512 Mb. From several tests even crysis overloads the cards for about 3-7% on full detail mode. The most greedy game for graphics memory is Stalker with antialising turned on from outside (if I'm not misstaking you can not turn it from inside of the game) - but it comes from bad optimisation.
So if you do not intent to buy big monitor and will have 17-19'' then no point in cards like GF8800GTS/GTX or GF9800GTS/GTX or their analogs from ATI moreover sli/cf. In this case you do not need main bord supporting sli and you can save some money and invest them in g-card or cpu or ram.
I know from overlockers that best cooling system in products of "Palit" company. Gygabyte makes nice cards with good cooling and nicely spedup (overloccing from producer)
One more thing - I woul like to recommend you Hynix ram cards. Very stable and reliable! Bought two sticks 1gb each and happy as an elefant in rainy day!
UPDATE
And take 4 gb of RAM as sonn you will have vista (we all will eventually) and that beast eats RAM like crazy!!!
Listen to joke (it is about CPUs but it suits RAM well also):
- why do we need dual core CPUs?
- to look a movie at the same time.
- at the same time with what?
- with vista.