Hi,

I recently purchased a system for simulation. Its an i7 with 6GB (I'll expand it to 12GB soon), with 2 NVidia 260s. The NVidias have 896 MB DDR3 Video RAM, and they are running SLI.

The Motherboard is a Foxconn Flaming Blade. It has 2ea PCIE-X16 slots for video cards in SLI or Cross-fire, 1ea PCIE-X1, 1ea PCIE-X4 slot, and 2 Standard PCI Slots. It has alot of built-in functions too. It has 6 SATA-3 connectors, runs 0, 0+1, 1, & 5 RAID configurations,

It also has 12 USB Ports and 2ea 10/100/1GB Ethernet ports. I guess whatever you do, you may have to change Disk Drives from PATA to SATA or use adapters. I used adapters on my old Core 2 Duo system with 750GB drives with no problems for a year.

The new system has 4 TB of WD drives.

I dual-boot Vista 64 and Windows 7 RC1.

I perform lots of simulations, and like you need the pixel pushing power for (don't discount that, drawing arc's takes alot of processing time). PCB Layout uses lots of arcs for plane fills unless you process negative planes to save time.

I run some very large (some system level) SPICE simulations. Even a Quad or Dual Hyperthreaded 3GHz Zeons can't touch it.

What's nice is when you have 4 Hyper-threaded cores (shows up as 8 cores on Windows Performance Monitor), nearly buried trying to solve a simulation. I'm sure plane fills and auto-routing would benefit from that as well.

There are "kits" of Intel i7 920 plus an Intel X58 motherboard plus Vista with a Windows 7 upgrade certificate for less than $500.00 US. I never looked into them because I think I was able to get mine the way I wanted it.

Good luck with your decision.

Ross