@ Prav, you're very welcome. Regarding the PSU, I only know of PSU adapters from 24 --> 20-poles and not the other way around. You'll certainly be able to verify this detail with the supplier of the components. Concerning the display adapter, AFAIK there isn't a performance penalty or alike when mixing nForce chipsets with Ati GPUs. OTOH, there are 2 known issues with Radeons and Geforces; Radeons have a slight tendency to shimmer and the latter get bogged down when flying in a lot of clouds. Unfortunately, there's no clear, distinct better GPU for FS. The GPU itself depends a bit on what kind of gadgets or software you use. I.e. 3D glasses or stretching views are Geforce domains. Regarding the Ati mainboard chipset (guessing that's what you meant), they're still relatively new and sowith -likely- not many people are using them. I'ld stick with components which are widely applied so you can also get help if necessary. One final idea, considering the computer you're looking at, perhaps go for 2x1GB of RAM instead of 2x512MB. I say so because I saw my 'old' 1GB machine hitting over 800MBs quite often. Therefore, I'ld dare to state that 2GB makes your system a bit more future-proof. @ Edwin, thanks for posting your specs. That looks like an awesome machine! FYI, about a year ago I switched to a s754 AMD 3200 Clawhammer from a P4 Northwood 3GHz. Not expecting too much I was more than surprised. Specially in dense areas the performance increase was spectacular (ca 40%). Right now, I have some components on order again for the next upgrade - or should say crossgrade: Asus A8N-SLi, 3700 San Diego s939, IceQ X800XL and a BeQuiet 470W PSU. Yesterday, I got the my last piece of expensive GPU hardware in the AGP arena, a X800pro (an IceQ what else!?). I didn't expect to see much of an improvement but was -again- positively surprised, specially in the VC department. Mind you, this was the only area which improved but since I'm starting to really enjoy VCs, I'm more than happy. Curiousity kills the cat and my wallet! :-)Regarding philosophies, I also always say: 'Get as much computer as you can' (for FS). Specially in the CPU-field. However, I also believe one can go overkill. I'ld i.e. prefer to spend money on other things like rudder pedals (my best investment ever!) or a couple of add-ons. To give you an example, I was making choices between the A8N-SLi and A8N-SLi Deluxe. I concluded there's only a minor likelyness I'll use more than 4 S-ATA devices, so I chose the non-deluxe version. To put it short, IMHO the best one can do, is, to get a system which is taylored to the requiremnets during the lifetime of the components and not buying stuff/interfaces one will never need and/or reserve performance. Display adapters are fantastic example; what sense does it make to get a X800XT if you require a 1024x resolution? Of course, if it's forseeable one will soon be using high-res displays, it would make sense to get an adequate display adapter right from scratch. If not, wait until you get a new display and simply get the adapted adapter then. Just my way of reasoning... Cheers, good luck and kind regards to the two of you Jaap

Jaap,Agreed on your "going overboard" point. For example, considering how much of a hardware geek I am, I use very little hard drive space. Sorry I forgot this in my list of specs earlier, I'm using two WD 36GB Raptors connected via a RAID 0 array (I set this up before I found out that RAID 0 arrays actually yield practically 0% difference and I've been too lazy to reformat and reinstall everything, especially now that I'm using the Mac most of the time). In this day and age of 200, 300 even 400GB hard drives, I have 73GB of hard drive space and I regularly have up to 20GB of it free too! For most people, they would have gone for a much bigger hard drive but for me, I know not to go overboard on hard drive space and have stuck with the 73GB I have so far.Having said that, I still tend to overbuy a bit because I have this "either don't buy or buy the best available".Man, I'm jealous of your new hardware! I think once the AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ becomes available in HK, I'll dive into an upgrade! ;)Edwin

Hi Edwin, ha, and once you get your X2 I'll be the jelous one..! :-)FYI, I decided to order the a.m. components after somebody wanted to buy one of my P4 machines. In reality I wouldn't need it and am very happy with the s754. FS9 has dramtically changed the way I use FS and I've turned into a low 'n slow bushflyer. And in fact, even the P4 would fully suffice for this way of use. But being a tinkerer... So, if that isn't overbuying, what is?!? I also have 2 Raptor drives in my garage. They're phenomonal pieces of hardware, aren't they? The name alone is worth buying them! And believe it or not, I use one of them for a 'measy' 3GB file, the pagefile. With the new setup, I'll also be using the other Raptor for the same purpose plus two 80GB S-ATA-2 Hitachis. The rest of the 2 Raptors serve as backups. I'm extremely curious to see those S-ATA-2 drives in action. It's funny you mentioned Macs. They indeed look very appealing lately and I might 'need' to get one of those MiniMacs myself. Some of my best friends have recently left the Windows world behind and are happily using OS X now. Greetings to HK, good luck and kind regards Jaap

hi guysWell... I am all set for the purchase.. and then these NVIDIA guys came up with the launch of GEFORCE 7800GTX :)...Is this something i should be looking into or just forget about the launch and get the X850. The Gigabyte Geforce 7800 GTX G70 256MB 256bit GV-NX78X256V-B PCI-E costs

its going to be very expensive, so you will have to wait or do what i did, i upgraded anyways to an ati x800 256 from ati 9800 pro. i will later do the cpu depends on cost.

Hi Prav, since the Geforce7 is 'only' 50 quid more it might worth a thought? After all you get another 8 pipelines (for a total of 24). Nevertheless, I would go for the XL which probably costs around 200-250 quid and has more or less the same specs as the X850XT. Out of curiousity, how much RAM are you getting and what did the PSU investigations show? Cheers, good luck and kind regards Jaap PS, here's a site which lists the specs of Ati GPUs, if you scroll down to the bottom you'll find the same for Geforces: http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?locat...&var1=88&var2=0