Greetings all,I'm on the market for a new rig; comments are most welcome.Motherboard: We'll seeCPU: Athlon XP64 3800 or 4000 RAM: 1GB or 2GB (It seems in most games there's no difference)Graphics: Hesitating a lot.. ATI X850XT, nVidia 6800GT or 7800GTThe rest: Good enough...I know there's quite a bit of a price difference between the lower end of my choices (i.e. XP64 3800, 1GB and nVidia 6800GT) and the higher end (XP64 4000 and nVidia 7800GT), but I don't want to end up paying several hundred (Canadian!) dollars on a higher end rig that would only translate in 1 or 2 more FPS. For the GPU, my real hesitation is between the X850XT and the 7800GT; any ideas? I'm aiming for FPS in the mid-20s (at least) and for great image quality (running ASV, PMDG and LDS stuff, lots of AI and would like to run more advanced scenery). And, gentlemen, now's the time for me to upgrade... even my girlfriend thinks it's a good idea (Me: "I'd like to buy a PlayStation 3 when it comes out, it's three times less expensive than a new computer"; Her: "Yeah, but the PS3's three times more useless".)Thanks,Nicolas in CYOW

Hi Nicolas,It's hard for me to say whether the higher-end rig is "worth it" because it all depends on how much you want to spend. I'd urge you to go for the 7800GT simply because the other two, ATI's X850XT and NVIDIA's 6800GT are both previous-generation cards. If it were me, I wouldn't spend that much money knowingly buying something that's "old"! But would it translate into more than 1-2FPS? Maybe not, after all, FS9 scales less with GPU than with CPU.Similarly with the CPU, the difference between 3800+ and 4000+ is very small so the frame rate differential is going to be even smaller. But the 4000+ is probably one of the best deals going on at the moment and if it were me, I'd splurge on it. But then again, I must admit that I can afford relatively large budgets when buying new computers! ;)BTW, whether you get the frame rates you would like will depend a lot on the resolution you would like to use so I can't quite comment on that.Good luck and hope this helps!Edwin