I think Anand's January Mid Range Guide would be a decent place to start. Since you don't need a monitor you can upgrade components as need be. If you go AMD on an SLI motherboard (not a bad idea) you might want to consider checking over their NForce4 SLI round-up as I think there might be a better choice than the recommended ASUS board that the mid range guide suggests and I'm a huge Asus fan. The MSI K8N Neo4/SLI board with the onbaord SB Live! audio just seems to be a better way to go. That kind of onboard allows you to save $70 or so on a sound card and doesn't chew the CPU. Yeah an SB Live! may be 3 or 4 generations back now, but it is very adequate for most games still. You could also pick up some good info in the Beating the System: Upgrading Guide.
Since those are just some basic guidelines you may want to check some of their video card reviews or just take a look at Tom's PCIe VGA charts or if you decide to go with an AGP only board (I don't recommend that) Tom's AGP VGA charts as they are wonderful summaries. Keep in mind if you think about going SLI then you are looking at an NVidia video card. You'll have to watch which card you get since with the 6800's the pre series 400 would not do SLI. But it is something to keep in mind as you can start with one 6800 or 6600 now and a year or two later you can add the 2nd to get your video performance back up there. I actually did this years ago with the Voodoo2 cards. I had one, it worked fine and then a year later I got my 2nd one and SLI'd them and was quite happy with it's performance for another year and half.
There is a lot of other info out there, but I feel that these basics should help you figure out where to go with a bunch of it. Ars Technica Guides are good as well but they aren't updated as frequently as Anand. And of course all 3 of the sites listed are good for specific hardware review, but you can poke around on them for that.
Since those are just some basic guidelines you may want to check some of their video card reviews or just take a look at Tom's PCIe VGA charts or if you decide to go with an AGP only board (I don't recommend that) Tom's AGP VGA charts as they are wonderful summaries. Keep in mind if you think about going SLI then you are looking at an NVidia video card. You'll have to watch which card you get since with the 6800's the pre series 400 would not do SLI. But it is something to keep in mind as you can start with one 6800 or 6600 now and a year or two later you can add the 2nd to get your video performance back up there. I actually did this years ago with the Voodoo2 cards. I had one, it worked fine and then a year later I got my 2nd one and SLI'd them and was quite happy with it's performance for another year and half.
There is a lot of other info out there, but I feel that these basics should help you figure out where to go with a bunch of it. Ars Technica Guides are good as well but they aren't updated as frequently as Anand. And of course all 3 of the sites listed are good for specific hardware review, but you can poke around on them for that.
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It's all just zeroes and ones and duct tape in the end.
It's all just zeroes and ones and duct tape in the end.