Building new system, Please share your opinion

[Guest AeroFox]

I'm about to start building my new computerI play BF2 , Flight Simulator 2004 and Lockon,Plus working on 3DSMax sometimes.Here is the specs , please give me your opinionAMD Athlon 64 4400+ X2 2.2GHzAsus A8N-SLI PremiumOCZ 2x 1GB PC3200 Platinum MemoryThermalTake Kandalf VA9000SWA CaseThermalTake PurePower ATX 12V 2.0 Plus EPS 680WWestern Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GBAsus GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB PCI

[Guest Edwin]

Aerofox,Sounds like you have a good system there! (Quite like my own! haha...)My only comment is to do with your RAM. Make sure you are getting OCZ Platinum Edition Rev. 2. And are you sure you want 2GB? I can see that you want to make a dream machine but I wouldn't expect much of a difference between 1GB and 2GB. If you do choose to go for 2GB, I've had my doubts about 1GB sticks (I've heard they can be problematic i.e. less stable) but on the other hand, if you use 512MB sticks, you would be using all four banks on your motherboard, which can also lead to less stability. I had 1.5GB before in four sticks on my A8N-SLI (non-Deluxe, non-Premium) and I recently took out 512MB (two 256MB sticks). Although I didn't do any benchmarks on it, my gut feel is that 1GB (i.e. using two banks) feels more smooth. Having said that, I had no stability issues using all four banks and the smoothness MAY be because the 512MB I pulled out were two older Corsair PC3500 DIMM's. (Everything in the BIOS and CPU-Z checked out i.e. that they were running at PC3200 speeds but the system just felt less smooth.) Anyhow, just wanted to say that you may want to consider whether you indeed want 2GB. The performance improvement is minimal (if any) and could lead to stability problems.And on the motherboard, are you sure you need the Premium version? I compared all three variants ("standard", Deluxe and Premium) and although I had the budget to go for Premium and I was building a dream machine (AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+, Leadtek PX7800GTX), I just didn't need any of the features in the Premium board. Having said that, the chipset fan on the non-Premium boards are iffy (ASUS acknowledges the issue and are sending out free replacement chipset fans) so maybe going with the Premium board would get rid of that issue. I replaced mine with a Zalman Northbridge cooler (NB47J) and in doing that, even got rid of an incredibly noisy fan!Good luck with your rig!Edwin