Critique my build - £2000 budget

[Whoop]

I actually ditched the GTX 460 due to it apparently having poor Linux support and have replaced it with an old 9600GT (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169152) - is this a bad choice?

[oolon]

I have one of those intel SSD it very good, I really notice the difference in performance, even against mirrored 10k SAS drives I have also in my system. As you are wanting to run lots of VMs, drive head seeks will be a real problem for your system, an SSD will remove that problem. You could set your VMs so they boot from the SSD disk and use home/data areas, on a mechanical drive. As you have lots of memory disable all swapping on your VMs and use tmpfs for /tmp. As for your graphics card linux support for high end cards can be very basic, running a xen kernel often does not like the direct hardware access drivers like. Your probably have to go for the binary blob driverers from ATI/Nivida.

[Whoop]

I'm certainly getting an SSD, the question is whether I should go for the Intel or the Corsair?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=1231753 or http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/160GB...ite-70MB-s-OEM

Also, I don't plan on running Xen on my desktop. I'll be running KVM as there's no need to modify the kernel it makes things a load easier for a desktop (this is my primary desktop for day to day use).

[MSIC]

THere's nothing really wrong with the 9600GT, although it frustrates me that nvidia's cards especially havent dont anything in that sector (ie sub £100) in a year. Apart from continually renaming & re-badging old products that is.
I'd love to recommend an AMD product, which are better cards for the money, however we all know that they dont work so well in Linux.
More specifically, my own experience (in Ubuntu) is that they run ok, but once you enable Compbiz with the AMD driver, things go weird, VLC wont play back videos etc.... A shame really, although the future still may be good for AMD drivers in Linux.

Actually, overall i'd still recommend something like this Radeon 5670 (for example).
It'll perform comparably / slightly better in Windows-based games as well as having a better feature-list, Linux environments will still work albeit not necessarily with fancy 3d effects on (yet), and it'll be a lower power consumer overall.
Plus it's £10 cheaper than the 9600GT you link to.

[Whoop]

Hmm, if the 5670 can't do "fancy 3d effects" on Linux I don't really wish to go that way as its unlikely its going to provide stable performance overall - besides, I want "fancy 3d effects". I'm all for paying an extra £10 for the 9600GT if it actually works

[MSIC]

Fair enough, cant say I blame you if that's something that you want.
I still think that Nvidia have overall missed a trick to update their product lines.

[Whoop]

Changed my mind again, going with the 9800GT http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167835

Damn, this selection stuff sucks, I cannot make my mind up on anything

[Whoop]

Ordered