Hi all,I'm getting a new rig set up in the next couple of days, here are the specs:AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice (Step E6, dunno what it means but it looks nicer ;-) )Gigabyte K8N-SLI mobo2x 512 DDR 400 Geil memory sticks (CL2.5 with blue coating, I think they're VALUE ram or something like that)2x 6L200SO Maxtor 200Gb SATA HD's with 16Mb buffer and NCQ support (will function in RAID 0 array)Gigabyte Geforce 6600GT 128mb DDR3 video cardRaidMax Scorpio 868 Case with 420w PSU (by RaidMax as well)so, my expectations are pretty high up at FL380... my question is, will my lifelong dream (and many other simmers) of fluid, crisp, jitter free & blur free Flight simming is coming near fulfillment??for the record, when I say "fluid-crisp-you name it", I mean all sliders Maxxed out (3d clouds included, but I never go crazy for unlimited visibility settings) - AI traffic maxxed out (with UT) and throw in a nice PMDG 747 on final at KLAX during rush hour for dessert... too much? :-)Any response is kindly welcome and appreciated.

Hi,You may want to take a look at this thread:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...11763&mode=fullOne of the posters has a system similar to the one you are building and reports his frame rates.Hope this helps.Edwin

Hi, you'll certainly love the AMD64 CPU. However - there often is a 'however' :-) - I fear you'll only be happy with the display adapter if you don't exceed 1024x resolutions in conjunction with elevated eye candy demands. FS' clouds are still an issue with Geforces as far as I could judge. Don't know about the 7800s, but my 6800GT gets slammed with mucho clouds (@ 1280x). If you don't use apps like 3D glasses, I would advise going down the Radeon highway if FS is the main concern. Which one depends on the resolution in question. FWIW, I use a Geforce machine for Virtual Skipper and some other stuff and use Radeons on my FlyTendo(s). Personally, I'ld also leave Maxtor HDs on the shelf and not pay too much attention to that 16MB number which - indeed - looks very impressive. IMHO, the best HDs on the market are either 10k rpm Western Digital Raptors or 7.2k rpm Hitachis (both offer low seek times and high throughputs). I wish you loads of fun with your new machine, good luck and kind regards Jaap PS, if you're going hi-res plus mucho FS-addons, you might also want to consider 2GBs of RAM? This helps to have identical modules and not all of a sudden face the situation where you'ld like to get more but cannot find identical modules. Because the AMD64 CPU controls the RAM (instead of the mainboard chipset), they can be a bit finicky sometimes.