Rather than spend many thousands of $$ for a few days on the beach for Spring Break this year, I've decided to spend about $1.5 to 2.0k doing a custom PC building project with my son.  The machine will be his for gaming (and maybe... perhaps... on rare days... homework).  However, I plan to also run some firefly renders in the background when he's not using it.  So the machine needs to be a decent gamer but would be nice to have as a decent Poser renderer too.  I bought P7 but went back to P6 until they fix P7, so I don't expect a render speed boost from the dual core AMD yet... though it will be nice to get eventually (if P7 is fixed).

So I know several folks here have built their own rigs, and I'm hoping some of you wizards out there might take a gander at my proposed build and give me any feedback you're willing to give.

Thanks!  tguyus

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2

ZALMAN CNPS7000B-ALCU 92mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan (for CPU)

ASUS M2N-E SLI Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 500 SLI MCP ATX AMD

mushkin 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) with EPP Profile Dual Channel

EVGA 256-P2-N624-AR GeForce 7900GS 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 KO

(2x,in RAID 1) Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JSRTL 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Retail

LITE-ON Black 16X DVD-ROM 52X CD-R 32X CD-RW 52X CD-ROM 2MB Cache IDE Combo - Retail

Thermaltake Tsunami VA3000BWA Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower

Thermaltake Purepower W0129RU ATX12V 600 W power supply

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer 70SB073A00000 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI

Logitech X-140 5 watts 2.0

Raidmax KM-101SB Silver & Black 104 Normal Keys 15 Function Keys PS/2 Standard Keyboard Mouse Combo

NEC Display Solutions 1940CX-BK Black 19" 8ms DVI LCD display

OPTI-UPS SS1200BLK 6 Outlets Voltage Stabilizer

Microsoft Windows XP Professional X64

Notes:  Don't plan to get a second video card for now, though want a SLI mobo in case decide to add a second card later

thanks again!