New PC List and need Help Future Proofing

Thanks for stopping to view. I haven't built a PC in Four years and I came into some money and decided I should get a new PC for all my needs. I've been doing research and costs and such, coming up with a good idea of what I want. This will be an expensive purchase and need the forums help on some things. The only Pieces I have for a PC are a mouse and Keyboard. So here is the list:

Marked with * means unsure. I plan to watercool and overclock. The Most Worrisome for me is the videocard and motherboard. I do not know if the Video Industry will switch to SLI completly and don't want to have to change again so soon.

CASE: Lian Li PC V2100B (PC-V2100B) - 0275.50
PSU: OCZ 600W PSU (OCZ600ADJ) - 0205.00
*MOBO: DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 ( ) - 0155.00
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200 (ADA3200DIK4BI) - 0194.00
MEM: PC3200 DDR400 (OCZ4001024ELDCPER2-K) - 0300.00
HD1: WD Raptor 74GB ( WD740GD) - 0180.00
HD2: Seagate 200GB NCQ (ST3200826AS) - 0134.50
AUDIO: Creative Audigy 2 ZS (30SB035000000) - 0070.00
*VIDEO: ?? (??) - 0400.00
FLOPPY: Mitsumi Digital Card/FD (FA404A/404M BLK) - 0040.00
DVD-ROM: Lite On 167T (SOHD-167T) - 0030.00
DVD+-RW: BenQ DW1620A (DW1620-0C2) - 0075.00
MONTR: HP L2335 (P9615A#ABA) - 1423.00
TOTAL: 3481.50

The case and psu are BTX comliant for future proofing. The Monitor has Analog, DVI, Stardard Inputs with PIP so I wont have to get rid of it soon. Any HD's will not have to be replaced, neither will the Sound unless a major shift in Digital Audio. The Floppy reads Multiple Flash Media as well as 1.44MB FD's. The BenQ is DVD-9 Burnable, I worry about Blu-ray, HD-DVD and HDVD (Holographic).

Water Cooling is really quite confusing but I believe I want to use a T-Line Symmetric Cooling for GPU, CPU and Chipset. Any help with thoughts on that situation would be appreciated.

Anything to reduce costs as well. I will be modding it with a full plexi-glass side panel, modular mod on the psu, maybe a set of good DTS headphones...

Additions, subtractions, thoughts and angry outcrys for me having so much money to spend are all welcome.

Thank you again.

Looks to be a great system. I would say that you have looked into futureproofing pretty far and it shows in your setup. The SLI issue is a tough one and there are a multitude of different opinions on it. I happen to think that if you're really into futureproofing it might be worth it to get a mobo that supports it. Nice system.

If you're spending 3481.50 you might as well drop another 50 for an SLI board.

Well if I was you I would not get a raptor hard drive, the extra 2800rpm is not really worth the rediculous price but that's your choice, also a monitor that is going to run you $1500? Why not get a CRT (better for gaming anyways) that runs you $250 instead? I agree with the SLI board, you'd do better to drop the $1500 monitor and get dual 6800GT's for the video cards.

You may as well get the SLI board because it doesn't really matter if the industry switches to SLI or not considering that you can still run single PCIexpress video cards on the board as well as double and you don't have to run them in SLI mode, the industry is not going to go back to AGP 8X Even though our video cards as of today can't utilize the PCIexpress ports because going back to AGP 8X after having PCIe would be like going back to PCI when having AGP 8X.

As far as video cards, if you are going to get a single I would go with the Nvidia 6800 Ultra or the ATI Radeon X850 XT OR wait a while and drop the cash for the new line of ATI or Nvidia cards but if you get Dual 6800GTs or Ultras then you are more than guarenteed to be futureproof for a while.

If you want to get right down to it, there's no such thing as futureproof. Especially with the way the computer industry is throwing out products left and right. Your best bet would be to get SLI if you are buying now or wait a while and see about the 16x16 SLI boards if they come out or the new line of video cards.

Good Luck!!

well every one is right sept about the lcd and the raptors the faster the hard drive is the faster the game loads and the monitors are starting to not matter cause i can get the skinny moniters now and they can perform just like a crt or better it all depends on the manufactior but every thing else is right lol no offense fultz i just wanted to correct you on the raptor and monitor part

I wanted to come back and thank you all for responding. The nf4 Ultra has a small hack to it to produce a small bit of SLI, besides which any SLI board today won't do 16x16. I don't know if when it happens they will release a firmware upgrade like BenQ did for their 1600 to 1620, but it's more likely a hardware design and not firmware limitation.

A note on the Monitor. It's a large display at 23" with 16ms going for it. Usally 17" monitors are the ones that have that speed with any above being at 20-25ms causing ghosting in games. I do play a bit of the Roms with Mame and like that I can turw it 90 degrees to a vertical Monitor for things like Dragon Spirit and Raiden 2. Another is that it has dual inputs on the back with PIP so I can have Xbox at 1080i with my comp in the corner watching it compile anything if nessecary. At first I thought i was a bit pricey as well, but after thinking how old my current moniter is, I might as well look towards having this one for the same 5 to 8 years. I was worried most about the SED tech from Toshiba Coming out this year, though that will probally be for 30 - 50" screens I wouldn't use for a comp.

A note on the video cards, I'd gladely take a cheaper card and overclock it to be the same as the Later revisions if at all possibly (What I plan to do to the 3200+).

In the end I know a computer isn't an investment like a classic car was back in the day. So I just hope to have as many of these parts I'm choosing for as long as possible without having to upgrade for Games (The main reason)

well i still say get the best card you can afford man that way it will last longer then the older cards

Well, you are right about the game loading faster on a raptor but id rather have the storage @ 7200rpm than pay more for a 74gb raptor than you would pay for a 300gig 16mb cache hdd. The game will load faster, files will transfer slightly faster, but that's it, and the truth is it's mostly not worth it for the money.

As far as the flat panel display goes, if you want to go flat panel you can but you will get just as good performance out of a CRT as you would out of an LCD for cheaper with a better resolution. I think you guys may have mistaken my comment on the LCD monitors for criticism, but that's not what it was meant to be. I was looking more at the budget than the performance hit. Having $3000 is more than fine but I can not see any sense in spending over $1800 on a full system setup since it WILL go out of date within time and you'll be cursing yourself for spending so much cash on it.

As far as the video card goes, if you are getting a SLI compliant motherboard get a single NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT for now and then when the card doesn't perform well enough anymore after ATI and NVIDIA releases their new line of cards then the 6800GT will be cheaper and you can buy a second one and run it in SLI. If you aren't getting a SLI mobo then get an NVIDIA 6800GT AGP8x (PCIe is not going to make a difference on this card and the PCIe version is more expensive).

video i would buy a x800 pro vivo and flash the x80 xt pe bios to it 400$
dude dont get that case to much u can get better for less aka cooler master cmstacker/wavemaster
as for mobo get the a8n-sli deluxe or non deluxe lots of features 3dmark record was made on this board and ur processor is a awsum proc but make shure u get the 90 nm version it has a 2ghz fsb

u can get mor bang per buck with 2 60 gb sata maxtors on raid 0 than the craptor (lol)
that was actualy a typo i like the raptor it is awsum but costs way to much
raptor=40-60mBps
2 xraid 0=60-90mBps