I've had extremely bad luck with Maxtor drives. I have replaced countless drives during my time in the industry but Maxtor has by far the highest failure rate amongst desktop IDE/SATA drives in my experience. As far as SLI I'm not so sure of the current cost/benefit ratio. I would leave it to the early adopters to work out the kinks and pay the high prices. The motherboards with 2 16x PCIe slots and the proper firmware are expensive. 2 SLI-capable cards (and not all PCIe cards will do SLI) are expensive. High frame rates are impressive but after around 70fps the human eye can no longer discern a difference. Ray-tracing, fill rates, etc are more important in presenting that "real-life" look. Plus if you're on a budget it's just out of the queston anyway. As far as AMD/Intel: I was an Intel-ite for 6 years before moving onto a less stressful environment. There's nothing actually wrong with their procs and they are as stable as they come. AMD also makes a great product. I won't recommend either proc over the other. The on-chip memory controller of the AMD vs. the Northbridge-based MCH of the Intel design is less of an issue with single-proc machines. It becomes an issue with multi-proc systems where say 4 Intel procs will be using the same MCH, causing a bottleneck, while the 4 AMD procs will be using their individual on-chip MC's. On the one hand you have the price/performance benefit of the AMD (although the price part is narrowing slowly but surely as AMD realizes it can't continue to undervalue it's chips). And the chances of an unstable/incompatible system is getting to be slimmer and slimmer as time goes on and the chipset makers' products mature. On the other hand if you use an Intel proc and a quality motherboard based on an Intel chipset you are almost guaranteed a rock-solid platform. But you get a less efficient chip (for now; my buddies in Hillsboro tell me the next-generation chips are looking like world-beaters). So blah blah AMD/Intel this or that. It's not like you'll end up with a POS because you are "forced" to go kicking and screaming down the Intel path.
