Air Cooling - Enough?

[nwdaddy]

Hi Guys,
I'm putting a new machine together and I'm currently deciding on components. So far this is what I have:

Case: CoolerMaster ATX Cosmos S
Motherboard: Gigabyte S1366 Intel X58 DDR3
Processor: Intel HNehalem i7 920 S1366 2.66Ghz
Memory: 12 GB - Corsair DDR3 1333Mhz
HDD: 4X Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM SATA300 32MB
LCD: Asus 24" Wide Screen
Optical: LG 22X DVDRW SATA
Other: I'm also going to add the additional 120mm fans to the case.
Graphics: Not A clue

The system will be used for occassional gaming (Command and Conquer 3) but it's main purpose will be as part of my home study lab. This will need to run a lot of virtual machines, windows server 2003, windows server 2008, Solaris, Linux, and some basis Windows XP Clients.

I don't know what graphics card(s) to go for as I know nothing about this area of hardware - all suggestions welcome.

My main concern is overheating, will this case and the 120mm fans be enough to cool this rig or will I have to go down the water cooling route? I've never worked with that before and I'm nervous about safety. Particularly because this machine will run 24x7.

All comments welcome

 

[mindless728]

what is your budget? since you are doing occasional gaming but a lot of VM's then you might want to think about a dual socket LGA1366 Xeon rig, you can alwaysput a decent GPU in a workstation board

 

[theAnimal]

Air cooling is fine for 24x7 use. I would recommend an aftermarket cooler such as the Xigmatech Dark Knight.

For the graphics card either HD4890 or GTX275.

And for the PSU Corsair HX520.

 

[nwdaddy]

I'm looking at a budget of £1500, maybe a tad more if I can justify it.