Suggestions for a new build

Nope. SLI is not something NVIDIA is bothered about as much as single-GPU performance. Their revenue comes mainly from single-GPU cards, and this will never change.

SLI support has been piss-poor for the majority of games, compared to ATI CrossfireX support. Games are not made with SLI in mind; they are geared towards single-GPU cards because these are what the vast majority of gamers use. All new games have problems with dual-GPU setups that require patches to fix.

And you do realize that in some cases, a second card actually degrades performance? In others, it simply has no effect. And again, the 16x+16x SLI hype has been around since the nForce4 days; it is exactly that: hype and nothing more. There is no proof that a 16x+16x setup has any advantages over a 8x+8x setup.

Lastly, gaming systems get outdated extremely fast, due to the rapidly changing market for GPUs and CPUs. An i7 system today may be considered old tech as little as a year and a half from now.

i was actually going to suggest a crossfire setup but he was set on nvidia. Rage if the pci-e 16 bus acnt be saturated then why did ati make the crosslink thing in the 4870 x2 because they said that card could actually saturate the pci-e bus and cause a bottleneck? is it called sideport?

Hardware support for the Crossfire Sideport has been included in the HD 4870X2, but the feature is disabled by default, since perfomance gains are negligible, while power consumption is significantly increased. To put it simply, it is a 5Gbps peer-to-peer link between both GPUs for extra bandwidth. However, the card does not fully saturate whatever bandwidth the PCI-E slot provides, so the extra bandwidth from the Sideport link is never needed.

ahh i was just wondering i just know that i read somewhere that they only put the sideport feature in the 4870 x2 because it could possibly saturate the pci-e 16 bus

Ok, well, I guess I have some serious considerations to make.

The guy at work who SHOULD be a NASA scientist, brilliant guy, is the one I have been hearing a lot of my advice from. He tells me he has benchmarks for me that show the 1156 socket is better to go with than the 1366, more FPS.

I think my problem is I am basing to much importance on opinion. I have been out of the loop for so long, I no longer have the facts on hand like I always used to, so I was just hoping a diehard PC guru could just more or less say, this is the best, buy this, and go that way, which more or less did happen, but then of course, I find myself questioning it like I thought might happen. Now I am going insane trying to take every moment of free time in my days to try and learn everything I have missed over the years.

I decided on RAID 5 for SOME stability/security for the files. RAID 0 is the fastest yes, but at a reliability cost, depends on how often you back up your data I guess. Also, with the right RAID controller, you can gain full speed advantages for every hard drive you add. 4 is faster than 2 with the correct RAID controller to utilize it.

Guess I might go with one card for right now then, I am still really on the fence here, I just want to look in that case window and see those 2 big power hungry monsters together, just to brag and be ready for the future, and some of the games out now DO support SLI, and were developed with it in mind, but very very few, I agree.

You see here Tank, ATI will be releasing their DX-11 cards very soon. Then that might become the standard for the future. Like Rage earlier mentioned, it's really difficult to be self-assured regarding a "future proof" config. The best way to think of it, as I've learned from red1776, is "forward compatible" in this era of rapid hardware development.

As for being in doubt, that is but natural. I recently built my rig and I never really found any definitive answers. I just went with some excellent recommendations from here and my own intuition. And I'm not disappointed with my PC's performance. For you however, it is probably more difficult as you have a much larger budget to work with. Knowing you can get the best out there, it becomes doubly difficult assuring yourself as to which is actually the best.

As for the LGA 1366 Vs LGA 1156 debate, the i7 860 (LGA 1156) is slightly faster (higher stock speed) and runs a little cooler. However the i7 920 (LGA 1366) can be overclocked pretty well to reach those speeds. Also LGA 1366 will support the new i9 CPUs to be released. As for x16 SLI support, Rage has already cleared that saying x16 would not see any significant gains over x8. As I also mentioned before, the LGA 1156 is geared more towards the mainstream quad-core market and the LGA 1366 will be reserved only for enthusiasts wanting extremely high end machines.

Now, as you mentioned, and I quote "bragging rights", should sway you towards the LGA 1366 platform as you might want to get yourself a hexacore CPU sometime. Actually it's completely up to you. Invest intelligently and I guarantee that you won't be disappointed performance-wise. Not even with an AMD system. (But can't assure you of bragging rights. )

IMO that is the best thing to do. Learn as much as you can. Study all the benchmarks available on the internet and then make a final decision on the system that suits you best.