Definitely. It all depends on overall budget. But generally, it's better to make cuts elsewhere to put the money into your VGA card(s) for gaming.

And of course with an SLI motherboard, you always have the option of adding an additional card later when prices are lower.

Example: buying a GTX275 and then another later is actually cheaper than buying a GTX295 even today, and in some instances, actually outperforms the GTX295. Of course you can't add another GTX295 later for quad GPU gaming, which is pointless anyway on anything less than 30" resolutions.

The GTX260 Core 216 is probably your current best bang for buck by Nvidia, but again, budget permitting, you could go with a GTX275 for a bit more. GTX285 for a bit more than that actually sees diminishing returns over the GTX260 Core 216 when doing price/performance comparisons. In short; you're paying more per FPS than you would with the Core 216, but it's still faster.

Id get the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, but never in my life waste the extra money for just overclockability potential on Core 2 Quad Q9650 Extreme.
(consider a AMD Phenom II 940 also, if you don't hate AMD)

9600 GT and 9800GT would be extremely underpowered for that system, so forget those.

Getting a GTX 260 (wih regular 896mb) or ATI's 4870 1GB or 4890 1GB would be the optimal solution, because you'd get great performance and still money left to do a perfect GPU upgrade in 2 years (to a then costing $200-250 GPU).

i would like to thank everyone here for helping.... :)

here is my rig:

cpu: i7 core 940
motherboard: asus p6t deluxe
video card: gtx 285 2048mb sparkle or 2x275 gtx sli
power supply: cooler master real power m1000 modular
optical drive: blu-ray rw sony
cooling products: ram cooler patriots vortex, cpu - c noctua (i7)
monitor: 24" ws lcd asus
case: cm haf 932 or antec twelve hundred

if you want your PC to last, wait a few months and get a Direct X 11 card from AMD and Windows 7 at the same time. You would want to start with the latest features. Also if you want future proof you should get a Core I7 or AM3 platform from AMD as they are upgradeable whilst the platform you chose isn't.

thanks

Those components aren't even high end now.

You might be able to play some games in 2 years on low settings at a decent frame rate on a 22 inch monitor...

Anything else forget it.

I'd suggest going for the Core i7 platform, the cheapest 920 model cpu easily clocks to 4Ghz and is around 25% faster than a Core 2 Quad - clock for clock. The i7 mobos have come down in price a fair amount too can pick up a nice one for £200.

What OS are you using, you need 64 bit to get more than 4gb of ram +vram addressed and you should rather wait for Windows 7 than spend on Vista 64.

I would go for the cheaper options on all except the GFX card and overclock as much as possible and upgrade when needed (assuming Intel supports i7 sockets like the did the 775)

Also the cheaper Core i5 platform is coming out, so you have a choice between AM3, Core i5 (Mid range) or Core i7 (high end) CPUs. If you get Core i7 you'll have to stick with the high end range of processors and you'll probably pay more for the motherboard in return for probably just the ability to overclock and more memory bandwidth.

can 2xgtx 275 be better then 1 gtx 295?

They are about the same.