Well, I truly understand what all of you folks are recommending me and I really appreciate that. But what I'm really looking for is very matured and stable system setup that will give me high performance and overclockability while the price is somewhat reasonable. The reasons for my setup are as of follows (nothing is intended to be an offense):
1. I don't like the idea of using two graphic cards (SLI & CF) simply because I think it is a big ripoff to spend my money on two graphic cards when it is already getting outrageously expensive.
2. I really don't see the point in going nForce 4 as I won't use SLI and SATA2. Even though I would be interested in SATA2, I'm not sure if I will buy another drive at this time. It just seems to limit my upgradability with all of these new features rather than allowing me to have more options.
3. Shuttle barebones for Socket 939 seems to have a lot of problems. While I did own Newcastle 3500+, (later tried Winchester) with Shuttle nForce 3 system, it had too many problems and I got rid of it.
4. As much as I love overclocking, I value silence as well. Meaning I don't overclock to kill, but I just enjoy the process and the activity of overclocking. I like to buy stuff like XP-M that can overclock at very low voltage and stay cool. I hope I can do the same with this setup I'm currently planning.
5. I honestly don't see the point in these new platform/features e.g., PCI-E, Socket 939, etc. I hardly believe PCI-E will run the games any faster than AGP now and in future. As I was looking at the thread over at the ATI section just today, I saw a lot of people talking about how AGP X1800XT will not be as fast as PCI-E version even if they made one, but I don't think so; I think AGP still has the top performance level and if you take a lot of benchmarks, PCI-E doesn't look any better than AGP (X850XT PE AGP is just as fast as X1800XL PCI-E). So is Socket 939, I feel that the extra 200MHz HTT bus is unnecessary and Dual-Channel makes almost no difference. I hate to upgrade parts by parts, so I probably don't even need so called "upgradability".
In the end, if I can setup the system I'm planning of, I have a confidence that it will perform as one of the high end system while maintaining the cost low. I would think it will be very hard to match the performance of my future setup without using two video cards, which they have dumped their wallet for.
