Hi MiquelGot rid of RAID, sliders cranked up and I'm hitting 25 FPS consistantly. Appreciate the help.

Stutters are normally a problem with you overrunning your hard disk transfer rate, it has nothing to do with your video card.SLOW DOWN your video to fix it ;)Logic is quite funny really. You upgrade to super fast video which can drive 100+ fps, but now that much additional data has to be yanked off your hard drive and processed because you cranked your options up to insano levels and suddenly your drive becomes the limiting factor. The stutter is when your drive falls behind and suddenly your video does NOT have the info in time to display the next screen.Higher end systems using IDE drives pretty much require RAID0 configurations to have a nice high sustainable transfer rate.RayPS: If you want to check this out, just enable slew mode and start warping faster, you'll see just how fast your drive can put up with the data requests and you'll see your stutter problem get worse and worse as the rate increases.

Roger: There is no need to cut up your case. As long as you have a free pci slot, you can get (cheaply, I think) a card that is just a fan. Mount it right next to your AGP video card and it will stay nice and cool.sj MantelKEWR

To eliminate any stutters a format would be advisable. But that doesn't seem to be an option. Its important to clean your system out now and then :)

I have a RAID 0 config on a ABS X5 and I have no stutters at all.I use most sliders maxed and UT with PMDG737NG.I have 2 things runnng at startup and that is it.No virus scan on machine I install it every month or so and the delete it and use a reg cleaner to keep window reg clean.

Newegg has 9800 Pro's for $268 right now... I am so thrilled with my new one - FS looks damn near real now. The FX5700 gets beat in both speed and image quality by the 9600XT - check out hardocp.com

John,A reformat is NOT necessary. This shold be the absolute LAST RESORT.Typically, stutters occur because some other process is using up CPU. Often, people have CPU-intensive spyware, adware, or even trojan horses running on their machine without being aware of it.So, first step: make sure you don't have such processes running on your machine. If you're not a power user, there are many products out there (some free) for helping you remove these nasty things. Do a search on Google for "how to remove adware and spyware", and you'll find tons of hits.Hint: If you're a power user running XP, go to the "Startup" tab of the "msconfig" utility. With this, you can select which processes run at startup.- Bill