Hey everyone!I'm going to be upgrading my system soon, and here is exactly what I'm looking at. Could someone just look it over and make sure everything will be compatible. I've never put together a system before either, so any tips anyone can provide would be great! Thanks, here it is:- Chieftec ATX Mid-Tower with 600 Watt Power Supply- Asus SK8N nVidia nForce3 Socket 940 ATX Motherboard with 8x AGP- AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 / 1152 kb / 1600 Mhz FSB / Socket 940- Thermaltake A1838 Silent Boost / Socket 940 / Ball bearing, copper case cooling fan- 1024 MB Ultra ECC Registered Dual Channel PC3200 DDR 400 Mhz- Western Digital 120 GB / 7200 RPM / 8 MB Buffer / ATA-100 / EIDE Hard Drive- Artec 52x24x52 CD-RW / 16x DVD- Creative Sound Blaster Augidy 2 Sound Card- eVGA geForce 6800 Ultra / 256 MB DDR3 / 8x AGP / Dual DVI / TV OutI'm really pumped about this system, but would it be better with a Radeon 9800XT? I don't think the Radeons are compatible with the new FX chips yet are they? I don't really want to have to use beta drivers to run it.Thanks a lot, and any advice anyone can give is very much appreciated. Thanks again!!

Stick with the Geforce 6800. I heard that nForce chipsets don't like ATI cards. The 6800 Ultra will leave the 9800XT in the dust. I'd also look for a different CDRW drive. I heard the Artec ones are very loud. Other than that, everything looks very good.

Hey thanks a lot! What I actually meant was the Radeon X800 256MB DDR card, and not the 9800XT. Would this be better than the 6800? I sort of have a thing for ATI cards :(. I'll also look into a new CD drive. Thanks so much!

I think there is a tradeoff here. X800 Pro will give you a better water reflections (see the review on hardocp.com for comparison) but 6800 will give you a slightly better distant textures with higher mip-map level. Otherwise you will practically get the same level of visual experience and performance (in FS2004) with both cards. I was also going through the similar choice for my newly built system and trying to decide between X800 Pro and 6800 GT I finally settled on the X800 Pro. But it took me hours of reading diferent reviews, looking at many screenshots before arriving at this decision. Do you play any other games besides FS9 ? I don't so for me choice was easier since I looked at both cards in terms of FS9 but if I did I would have selected 6800 - it might be a better card for those who play Doom3 and other games like that.Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjM1LDQ=http://www.hardocp.com/reviews.html?cat=Mw==Kurt M

"I heard that nForce chipsets don't like ATI cards."Not true. nForce baords do quite well with ATI cards. Many serious gamers mix the two with no problems whatsoever.Greg

Hey thanks a lot for all the replies! I've decided to go with the Socket 939 A8V Motherboard with the FX-53 processor, and the X800 video card. Thanks again for all the help!