no, i've already specked up a rig for him, got it to £550 with very few compromises, i've carefully talored it to him and met all his needs including geforce 8 cards runing in SLi with a quad core CPU and 4X 250GB drives running in RAID 5... in the end i've decided to go with:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-008-SY&groupid=701&catid=57&subcat=821
it was either that of this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-030-TR&groupid=701&catid=57&subcat=821
Like i said... he's not planing to overclock it and it's not really a gaming rig, he's going to use it more for his music hence it needing to be quiet but he does like to play halflife 2 and doom 3.
thanks for the advice thought guys.
btw, yes they are rather cheap graphics cards but for what he's going to use them for they dont need to be fast, for what he's going to use the computer for it's much more cost effective to have two cheap SLi cards than one massivly powerfull one. he will be running relitivly low powered games on high resolutions and the cards i've specked are fanless with passive cooling, having two GPUs will spread the heat over the two cards allowing a higher performance without active cooling thus keeping the noise to a minimum.
dont think i've not done my research on this either
http://techreport.com/articles.x/7671/4
i've checked the real world benifits of SLi and weight them heavily against things like cost, value for money, performance and the needs of the guy i'm building the computer for.
I've EVEN looked at in depth comparisons between the different chipsets!
Regards jackal