SLi is a waste. Twice the cost for incapatibility (thus twice the cost, normal performance), double the power, noise, and heat, and not to mention the fact that it often doesn't give anywhere near twice the performance boost. In fact it can't give you twice the performance boost - or near enough in even games which are kind to SLi or AMR. Also if the game isn't supported, you'll have to make a profile - not hard, but still, shouldn't be necessary. Also some games won't stay in SLi mode and some will refuse to run it period. This goes for holding out hopes on ATi's AMR technology as well since current X800 and X850 cards are rumored to work (the chipset already has gone through it's beta runs and now taiwan is running of their initial builds of motherboards which should be on the shelves for intel in a couple months, AMD a bit longer. SLi/AMR is for those with more money than common sense to read btw the lines of benchmarks as some reviews are awfully short on the actual downsides of the technology. You are paying to be a guinea pig with SLi in it's current state (not to mention it isn't needed for R:TW). Here is an actual article in which the site used some bloody common sense which is getting harder to find these days. "SLi shortchanges gamers" http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzExLDI=

This is also the website that refused to pull an article on the backer of the Phantom Console that embroiled it in a legal battle that costed the site's owner nearly a quarter million dollars in legal fees to fight the case - and that is who wrote the article your reading. They won the case completely in a summary judgement filing they requested. So there is journalistic integrity there in the madness (quite a bit more than most all PC mags and even most sites as well since they often are more concerned about sugar coating even poor performing products for future gains from companies).

An A64 3500+ along with either a 6800 Ultra or X800/850 XT (Since R:TW is Direct X I'd say get the ATi solution since it is a tad faster - if it was Open GL I'd recommend nvidia. Still, with either your not going to go wrong) along with a gig of solid low latency ram and if you want the bare minimal of load times (as if they aren't short enough for TW) - either a set of Maxtor Diamond Max 16 meg cache drives or a set WD 74 Gig Raptors - it'll be as close to SCSI as you'll be able to get. If you want a bit more speed, you can RAID them - though personally I'd just heave the OS and low end applications on one and games on the other. Everyone loves RAID 0 until a disk failure.

Computers are quite simple to build nowadays and practically anyone can do it - and save a ton of money at the same time. You could get an A64 FX with SLi and all the other money wasters for the cost of most Falcon / Alienware systems that'll only give you half that for the same price. A solid reseller such as newegg will also give you a good replacement policy on parts with no hassle at all with RMAs. A little reading beforehand is pretty much all that is required - and even that I've seen people do without and manage well enough as well.

The nforce chipsets are fine for the most part - just that they won't work with the latest stepping from AMD is due to roll out (most boards won't that is). This is more than a BIOS issue - still it is a small issue since if you don't build your own, another company will deal with that problem (with an nforce board that works or through a VIA chipset) and if you decide to go down the road of building your own, the stepping code will tell you which to buy and not to if you want an nforce solution (higher HTT abilities than VIA solutions makes it an overclockers favorite). Not hard at all to avoid this issue until it is solved with PCB revisions for said motherboards.