Well after losing two 8800GTX's in the mail courtesy of Australia Post, I picked up 2 new ones from a local store on monday

Had SLI running within minutes of plugging them in, and since this is my first foray into Nvidia GPU's I must say thus far I am impressed. A very simple process.

I am also glad I decided on the DFI 680i as the extra PCI slot will be handy. The 3rd x16 PCI-E lane is a waste, but not to worry.

My only concern is the fan on the southbridge is a little noisy at times since installing the 2 GTX's, but it comes and goes and isn't too unbearable. Lucky my MIPS blocks are arriving soon

I'm also still very seriously considering going to phase change cooling.

I am going to reinstall XP and Vista this weekend. I am coming off a RAID 0 array of 2x320Gb Seagate 7200.10's and will be replacing them with a single 150gb Raptor.

I'll perform some benchmarks etc and see how the Raptor performs under both XP and Vista. Stay tuned.