First Build...maybe

[ishotharold]

Hello all, My HP pavilion has about bit the dust (lockups at any intensive task such as photoshop, theres a click and then a continuos beep, anyone got ideas on that? the things ancient but it'd be nice to have as a back up if its a simple fix) At any rate it means the money I was going to spend on a new lens and camera gets to goto a new computer instead. I am a photographer and need a machine that cna crunch through batch processing pictures in a hurry, photoshop will far and away be the most used program along with a RAW conversion program (memory intensive). With that in mind I am looking at this:

Antec TruePower 2.0 550w PSU

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ san diego 1ghz FSB 1mb L2

ASUS A8N-SLI deluxe

eVGA (what happaned to nVidia, I couldnt find them on newegg?) gforce 6800GS 256MB PCI Express

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 250gb HD (possibly two of these but I have externals so maybe not)

CORSAIR value select 1gb DDR400 (pc3200) most likely get 4 of these from the start

Was looking at this case but I dont know what to look for in a case, I know I DONT care about fancy LEDs and DO CARE about a stable system, is there any reason to get one with a thermometer?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811119094

With this in mind my concerns are:
Is SLI the way to go or should I do something else, I know SLI lets you run two video cards, but I've heard it may not be all its cracked up to be if I dont get 2 video cards from the start. Am I better off getting something else?

Do I need to buy a heatsink or is the one with the CPU sufficiant? I dont plan to overclock, I just want a rocksolid system that moves

I might keep my old optical drives (12x CD/RW and 16x DVD-ROM) and get an external DVD burner, still unsure on that. Am I missing anything else?

I want to have the option of running dual displays, do I need to watch out for anything in regards to my videocard in this case?

Finally, my math puts this system right around 1000, in theroy I could spend another 500. My thoughts at this point are:
1) use that money to upgrade components (but not sure where it'd be best)
2) use that money to buy a nice display (suggestions? think BIG and true colors)
3) this system will smoke as is and I can keep the money so I can maybe swing the next 1000 lens before baseball season starts.

Any comments appreciated. This site is awesome and I look forward to learning more.