First I wanted to reclaim my Barra IV 40GB which had linux installed on it. Unfortunately windows disk installer does not recognize the hard drive. You'd think what would it care if it's formatted using one of the unix filesystems or not, but apparently it does. As of now I have no idea how to form...

If you do go for the 7900GT you should know that there is no working fan controller on most of them (the fan will spin at full speed all the time). You can of course swap the fan if you want to.

AMD64 TCaseMax - v1.19 ---------------------- CPU Information (CPU #1): Standard CPUID: Family: F, Model: 7, Stepping: 1 Extended CPUID: Family: F, Model: 27, Stepping: 1 CPUID String: 20F71 Processor APIC: 0 Processor: AMD Opteron 146 (San Diego) CPU Speed: 2500.00 (250.00 x 10.0) Revision: SH8-E4 ...