That was quite some journey in both time and distance before you managed to get a fully up and running system. I'm glad it finally all now seems to be working.

And I hope your new graphics card turns up soon...

But I have one question. Why did you opt to go for an nVidia card? With the current range of nVidia cards they are definitely fast, but they are also very highly overpriced. When I built my new PC at the end of March I looked though all of the performance charts and reviews online and concluded that the ATI Radeon HD 48XX range of cards is much better. A huge price to performance value compared to nVidia's cards.

I ended up purchasing an XFi Radeon HD 4870 1GB XxX (factory overclocked) and it is a brilliant card for the price. These can now be purchased for just over £130 and out perform a GTX260 in most tests.

And now the newer faster card, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB is under £150 and is a brilliant card for the money. And with that price you can buy 2 of those and connect them in crossfire mode (similar to SLI) for less money than a single GTX295.

If your nVidia card is still taking time to arrive I would highly recommend you take a look at the Radeon 4890 cards and consider cancelling your order. My 4870 can run all games released to date at maximum settings with a resolution of 1280x1024 and with framerates that never drop below 60fps, which is impressive. The 2D graphics quality is also better than nVidia cards for the desktop and programs like Photoshop.

I personally just don't see a reason to spend so much on the high end nVidia cards at the moment because of the ATI 48xx range.

It is also interesting that you went for a Quad core Phenom II. It would be good to see what real world performance you can get out of it. I've been an AMD CPU fan for years, with my last Intel chip being a Pentium 2. But with my new system I switched back and bought an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU. They just out perform all current AMD chips by some margin, run much cooler than current AMD chips, and have amazing overclocking abilities. It is a complete switch around from the last round of CPUs where these exact properties were what made the AMD64 chips so good.

My Q6600 has a standard speed of 2.4GHz, but running with an Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro heatsink I have it overclocked to 3GHz without issue. It idles at about 20 degrees, and under full load only hits about 40 degrees max. Quite an amazing chip. And I've read other Intels are just as good. The very cheap E5200 (which I just used to build someone a new system) for example is 2.2GHz standard, and can easily be overclocked to 3.6GHz, even on stock cooling. The only thing I hate about the current Intel CPUs is the heatsink connection to the motherboard. It is fiddly and hard to fit compared to AMD ones.

If I were buying a new CPU now though I would look at the higher up Q9550 or Q9650 chips as their prices are falling fast.

Regarding your heatsink. That was quite an expensive heatsink! I hope it performs well? Did you looks at the Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro coolers? They are only about £22 and perform brilliantly, although still just as large as your new one going by your pictures. I have the Freezer 7 Pro in both AMD in Intel forms, with the AMD one fitted on my old AMD64 3700+ CPU overclocked to 2.6GHz and now used as my emulation system. And there is now a new Rev.2 of this heatsink that is meant to perform even better with a near silent 92mm fan.

Finally there is one thing I noticed about your setup that might be an issue. The 600W PSU. nVidia cards suck a lot of power from the PSU under load. A GTX285 is stated as needing 40A on the 12V rail it's using, which a lot of PSUs cannot deliver. Most people use at least 1kW PSUs with these cards. Again the ATI 4870 cards are much more energy efficient and run perfectly well on even a 500W PSU.

Just some food for thought.