well this is kind of a long story, but i bought a new shinny gamming rig with the following specs:

Asus A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
Nvidia 6800XTreem 256M PCI-e (SLI configured)
2G PC3200 ram
300G sATA Seagate drive
Aopen 16x dual layer DVD combo drive
Mitsumi floppy
Antec full tower 500W Smartpower PSU

with all of that said, winXP Pro runs flawlessly, well as good as any MS OS runs, on this rig. To the point it is so powerful i can play EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and UT2k4 all at the same time with maxed out AA on the hardware and never drop below 60 FPS when playing UT2k4 and have no system lag in either WoW or EQ.

so this rigs hardware rocks.

I have tried 32bit Debian testing net install CD. that just ate it self after less then 2hrs and got to the point i had to pull the power plug as nothing was responding and the NIC was up and down way to much.

FC5 64bit does not have any GUI to speak of. even after manually installing and properly configuring xorg.conf to get the nvidia drivers working no GUI.

SuSe 10.1 free semi works, but i am not a fan of how yast does things and after installing libdvdcss to play my DVD movies and rebooting i lost 100% of the graphics. to the point with runlevel 3 being the default the screen "no signal" and goes black. great... at least i was able to get the Nvidia drivers installed, sli=on, and the 3D was working (roughly 12k FPS in glxgears) but i have no idea how to recover from this issue. i can boot into it, i can login and even su for a shutdown -r now to work, but that is it. yes i can ssh in, but sorry, i did not pay this kind of money to NOT have a GUI to play me media and games.

according to the system info my vid cards are on the supported Nvidia chipset as it is the 6800 XT 0x00C3 both of them and according to the little tests that Nvidia has to see if the kernel is detecting both cards properly, it is.

so i am asking for help to get this powerful rig up and running so i can have 100% media support (DVDs, avi files, mpg4, mp3, etc...) plus enough power to run games with Cedega like EQ and WoW. as for UT2k4, there is a native linux vs so i am not worried about cedega there, but would still love to be able to really push this hardware to see what happens.

Links to good HOWTO sites, help fixing the issues i am having with suse 10.1, anything to get me going. i am not a total newbie to linux, but when it comes to dealing with hardware in linux i am at a complete loss.

thank you.

Give arch a try? My HW is similar to yours (64 bit processor) and works flawlessly, but i use 32 bit since app support for 64 bit is lacking at the moment. I have 1 7800 though, not an SLI, try it on 1 graphics card to get it installed/working then work on getting the SLI setup?

ASAIK EQ (1 or 2?) doesnt work well on Cedega, i tried and it was crap, WOW, well that's crap Cedega or not :P

Linux will handle all those media requirements, DVD can be a bit of a fiddle but it works

Your problem could be motherboard related.
You talk also of a lot of problems with FC5 and Debian, but you don't specify any errors, that way is very difficult to help you out.
Give more info on your problems (logs, configs, error messages and so on)

yes sorry about no logs and what not. the info i have above is all that i got before the system died to the point i had to pull the plug.

as for it being a MB issue, it is not hardware, could very well be driver related though, but not hardware. it is a multi boot system (winXP Pro, Vista beta2 (does not run in normal mode only safe mode), and linux)). so i know the hardware is good.

i have had winXP running on it since about a week after i got it and could not get SuSe 10.0 to run any kind of media support like DVDs, or even basic MP3s after following many "howto" pages on the web to make SuSe do so. oh well.

that is one thing i have loved about Debian, no issues with mp3, avi, vod, etc... sadly it does not like my hardware on this new rig.

i would prefer a 64bit Distro to try things on before i resort to sticking with 32bit. heck for that matter i might as well stick with XP on this rig if i am stuck with a 32bit OS as everything seems to work in XP, hardware wise that is.

When I said it could be hardware, I wasn't meaning your hardware is not ok, but more Linux is not able (nowadays) to handle the hardware correctly, thus the problems you might have.

You can try to use Gentoo 64bit edition. If you're not new to Linux, is not that difficult to install, but it's harder than Debian. For me, Gentoo is the only distro that had run with no flaws at all.

i would love to give gentoo a try. i have the universal CD, and was following the steps, but i goofed someplace as i am still semi new to the hardware world of linux.

that and partitions are still slightly confusing even though they really are simple.

i currently have 2 partitions both NTFS, one running XP pro, other Vista beta2 and am not willing to lose either of them for the moment. specially seeing how i have to much data on both partitions that i do not have room for on my LAN to move them around.

i ran into an issue trying to mount the kernel to /boot becuase i did not creat a /boot partition as i was afraid of screwing up the MBR for XP/Vista.
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i have /dev/sda1 NTFS and /dev/sda2 NTFS with sda1 being the one with the * in fdisk so that is the "bootable" partition. i take it that is /boot?

im so confused on that part. i do have to give gentoo great credit as their directions are very straight forward and do not assume to much about the users abilities. thank you gentoo for writting a "HOWTO" that the average idiot can understand

No, you don't need to have a /boot partition (I don't have it myself). That partition is intended for not mixing boot files with systems files. You're free to place your Linux partitions where you want, and how many you want as well, BUT, you need to install GRUB (or LILO) into that * partition.
I *really* recommend you to transform NTFS partition into FAT32 ones if you want to have write support for Linux, and, for simplicity, you can do the Linux partitions beforehand with PartitionMagic for example, that way you don't have to format anything. Having a GUI for partitions is a lot more clarifying

Gentoo handbook is written for 4 years old people. so it's EXTREMELY clear how to install it step by step. I also thanked a lot this handobook. It's the Gentoo bible almost!!

once a partition is NTFS it can not safely be moved to FAT32. also vista does not even give the OPTION of FAT, it is NTFS or nothing. i really do not want write permissions to the ntfs, just read and i can read them just fine for the short times ive had linux working.

Ill get my hands on partition magic and see about setting the partition tables up before i give gentoo an other crack.