hey little update,i have broke it down to these cards,(the ATI 6 series might be too expensive) would be sufficient in playing my current games in hi res on 3 monitors,what do you think? What would run fine with my system specs,as i say i dont wanna rush in and buy,then have a bottleneck.
2 X Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
1 x Asus GeForce GTX 480 1536MB PCI-Express HDMI
1 x Sapphire ATi HD 5870 2GB GDDR5 PCI-E 2.0 (x16) DVI HDMI 6 x mini DisplayPort Eyefinity 6 Edition Graphics Card
thanks
Surrond gaming on Nvidia hard ware REQUIRES SLI so a single GTX480 will NOT work, (edit: sorry ZafaZ just realised you commented on this)
Does your mother board have 2xPCI Express x16 slots (8 electrical as you are on P55 chipset, 8 electrical is fine btw)
Does your mother board have the Nvidia BIOS hook for SLI? (this is a licence payed by the motherboard vendor to allow SLI, its not just the case of having 2 PCI express slots for Nvidia, ) if you dont have it you can not got Nvidia with out a motherboard change.
If you go ATI you will need either a DP-DVI ACTIVE adaptor or a DP capable monitor. my advise is NOT to get a DVI Dual link active adaptor as the single link's have just been anounced and they are 100% compatable with no down sides, and alot cheeper, and the res of each panel is below the maximum bandwidth of the Single Link DVI interface.
If you are going for 2xGTX 460 you are likely to be CPU limited, so even if you have 2GB of ram you will not get the maximum performance from the video cards. that i7 860 should clock to 4Ghz if you have a decent motherboard and 1600Mhz RAM. although on SOURCE based games that will not be a problem as the engine is several years old now
Running any multi high end card (460's, 470's, 480's, 5850, 5870, 5970) will produce a lot of heat under heavy load, and would strongly suggest NOT going SLI or XFire unless you have good cooling within your case, if you have a standard off the shelf PC like a Dell or HP you will very likely NOT have enough cooling for the needs of multiple cards, if you did a custom build then you are more likely to be able to add cooling as required.
Unfortunalty you were more intrested in letting us know your keyboard model and that you have a stearing wheel, over giving us the important information such as motherboard model, case model and PSU details. Therefor any suggestion made here will be best guess. So please let us have the entire important information and i'm sure my self of many other members on these forums can give you a much better informed decision on what would be your best options.
(sorry about the b**ching, in the middle of that :) )
Honiara