BleepingComputer.com: Putting Together A Game Machine!

I'm currently putting together a new 64 bit computer. I'm wondering which operating system I should install on it? I would like to get the most performance out of what I have
Current components that I have:

- ABIT KN9 SLI NVIDIA Socket AM2 (940) ATX Motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ 2.80GHz Socket AM2 OEM

- OCZ SLI-Ready Edition Dual Channel 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz memory

- 2 XFX GeForce 8500 GT / 256MB DDR2 / SLI Ready / PCI Express / DL DVI / VGA / HDTV / Video Cards

- Seagate / Barracuda 7200.10 / 500GB / 7200 / 8MB / ATA-100 / EIDE / OEM / Hard Drive

- Lite-On LH-20A1L-06 SuperAllwrite Retail Lightscribe DVD Burner - 20x DVD±R Burn, 16x DVD±R Read, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 8x DVD±R DL, 12x DVD-RAM, 48x24x CD-R/RW, Black, SATA

- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound card

Seeing you only have 2gigs of ram you may as well stay with Windows XP, which is still the best gaming OS. Now if you had 4gigs of memory i would suggest Vista 64 bit which would allow you to see and use all 4 gigs. I'm using Vista x64 and 4gigs and i'm not seeing many of the problem that most people report with vista64 and gaming is very good. On saying that i would suggest you stick with XP if gaming is all you do.

Gaming on xp > gaming on vista no questions asked. . .At least for now. Maybe when directx 10 catches on. . .But for now I'd stick with xp. I would go with a sata harddrive instead if your mobo supports it, and maybe get two smaller drives instead of one big one. I run one drive strictly for the OS, one for programs and stuff like that, and one for photo and movie storage. Running more than one helps with organization and fragmentation, and speeds up your OS.

IME the major competition for disk access is the pagefile. As such, I put my pagefile on a separate drive from the OS. Since it's small, it only takes up a small part of my storage drive - and it's placed on the fastest portion of the disk to decrease lag time.