$1500 PC design challenge

[Lemur]

Might consider waiting for the Fermi cards to be released in the next couple of months. Not only will you have bigger selection of cards to pick from, the price of the ATI cards should drop.

That might be a real wait. According to the latest news, the Fermi cards won't ship until mid-March at the earliest, in "low quantities," and they're gonna be hot, hot, hot.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Do not forget the PSU; I imagine that the friend is upgrading from fairly generic components.

EDIT: Actually as far as ‘upgrade’ goes it is probably better to simply check what components can be reasonably carried over from a previous PC (if any) first.

[Roman_Man#3]

That might be a real wait. According to the latest news, the Fermi cards won't ship until mid-March at the earliest, in "low quantities," and they're gonna be hot, hot, hot.

Your first link says that the 5800 series from ATI is getting 4% yields, which is untrue. If they were only getting 4% yields, there would be even less in stock than there are now. It's closer to 40-60%, and Fermi is getting better yields than that site sayss as well: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17205/1/

Concerning heat, that same article says:

we were told that while running one Fermi card alone or two single-GPU cards is fine, going any higher may introduce thermal issues.

So if one fermi card is fine, and 2 fermi cards are fine, that means you have to triple SLI to get thermal issues. And I don't think triple SLI for fermi is a matter of concern for the OP considering the budget.

[Lemur]

Your first link says that the 5800 series from ATI is getting 4% yields, which is untrue. If they were only getting 4% yields, there would be even less in stock than there are now. It's closer to 40-60%, and Fermi is getting better yields than that site sayss as well: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17205/1/

Fari enough, and I stand corrected. From your link, however, this is salient:

Those in the know are claiming that Fermi despite the yield and thermal issues is only about 20% faster than Cypress, while Hemlock smokes it. The combination of low yields, high thermals, and marginally better performance than Cypress could be conspiring to place Nvida in the position of having to release the card, but have to sell it at a loss till they are able to address the issues in the next spin according to sources. Because of the situation a mole we know is suggesting that Nvidia may limit the sales of Fermi to consumers and instead use the chips for the Tesla and Quadro products where prices and margins are much better.

Which just drives home my original point, that waiting for Fermi is an iffy idea, especially when the 58XX series from ATI is here, available, reasonably priced and does the job. You can always wait for the bigger, better, badder tech coming down the pike. But if you're building a gaming boxen, at some point you need to take a look at the landscape and see what makes sense now.

I do not believe Fermi is going to be available in quantity and at a competitive price any earlier than late spring/early summer. That's a hell of a wait for unproven tech.

[Tellos Athenaios]

And there will be the obvious first round of driver bugs etc. etc. to iron out.

[Roman_Man#3]

Well, I'm not really suggesting he wait so that he can buy an nVidia card, more so that the landscape smooths over a bit. ATI's cards are starting to come down in price thanks to yields improving, and as time progresses up to the Fermi release, they'll only get lower as ATI tries to undercut nVidia as much as they can. I'd suggest at least waiting a couple of weeks to see if ATI's pricing trend continues.