Paul, a couple of observations on your setup.
Abit BH6 - great choice, best MB I ever had. Yes it supports temp monitoring via shareware, although it is only MB temp & not CPU.
software is available at euronet.nl
I would save some money, and increase performance by using the BH6 to overclock a celeron 300a instead of the PII 350. This may raise some eyebrows but it is really a viable option. I have been running for quite a while now on a BH6 300a OC'ed to 464 mhz. Benchmarks better than a 400. Runs rocks solid with no probs, either in NT or 98. There are many links on the web on OC'ing, the Abit MB is best choice for this. My favorite site with great info on OC'ing is the unofficial ABIT page. bxboards.pair.com In my mind, spending less on a processor now lets you upgrade quicker when new stuff comes out.
The price you show on ram is quite expensive. The best quality PC100 ram (samsung or equivalent) 128 meg should only cost around $214 for GH spec or $249 for G8. ECC dimms are not needed. Available at
mushkin.com or
memory-man.com
They also sell great bundles.
Having used several dual processor P2 Motherboards, both in server and workstations and after closely monitoring the NT taskmanager-Processes-CPU time over a long period, I have concluded that there are very few instances where a dual processor will give you any kind of perceivable edge. The processor utilization is always below 10%. If you watch closely you can sometimes see it spike up, but it returns back down immediately. Dual boards are rarely needed, never in trading. And I echo Spots' opinion on them.
As far as the monitors, I have 2 P810's from Master Repair. I am running at 1280 x 1024 at 72 hz. They are great right there. The PT813 is an aperature grille monitor, some people feel that aperature grilles aren't quite as sharp on text, but superior on graphics. I think the P815 is basically the same tube, just a higher refresh rate and rez, which I don't think you would use. It is always better to use the lowest possible refresh rate, without perceivable flicker, to give the sharpest text. I would be happy with G810's P810's or the P815.
If you are really putting 4 monitors in a single system, I would only use one of the "multi-monitor on one card" solutions (either 2 or 4). Don't know the links to the other companies, but Matrox is coming out with theirs very soon. They cost more, but less hassle with conflicts and drivers and that will solve the PCI slot shortage.
Finally I believe the best choice to insure stability is to do NT 4.0 now. With the amount of hardware and apps you are running, NT will perform much better than Win98. Myself, I would never do that setup in 98. There are a number of posts from the weekend discussing this.
Sorry to ramble adn I hope all this will help some. Looks like it'll be a killer system.
Good Luck
Dan
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