Hoping to get a reasonable experience with FSX now and be ready for that famous DX10 update, whenever that appears. CPU: C2D E6600 Mobo: Intel D975XBX2KR LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX EVGA GeForce 8800GTX 768MB GDDR3 Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 PSU: Antec True Power Trio TP3-650 ATX12V 650W 2xSeagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s (RAID 0) Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower SAMSUNG 18X DVD

Nothing off the reservation, looks OK to me. Not sure the RAID 0 is the best way to go, but it'll work...just could be an issue if overclocking, and my experience is that RAID 0 doesn't help too much in FS because head seek latency takes away any gains made by increased bandwidth, except maybe at loading time. Personally, a single 500GB SATA-II (3 Gb/s) HDD and another GB of RAM would probably be considerably faster than the RAID at nearly the same price.What's the plan for a CPU cooler? Extra cooling fans?CheersBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VSantiago de Chile

thanks man -- appreciate the input. someone else has just suggested I ditch the RAID configuration and I think you;re both right. do you think I should switch to a 10,000 RPM drive like the raptor?not overclocking, so i was thinking of using the ... gasp... stock heatsink. this case is apparently something of an air conditioner, so i thought that would be fine. mistake?

and one other thing -- you mention that popping in some more RAM would be a good idea instead. if budget weren't a primary concern, would you just toss in another two gigs of the kingston and fill up the mobo capcity? don't i run into a problem with going beyond a certain amount of unbuffered memory at some point? (sorry to be a real noob here, but i have to admit i don't understand memory properly at all.)moreover, is 4 gigs of memory it worth it if i'm going to load xp pro and not vista on this thing?

The 10K RPM Raptor would be an excellent choice...I am using a 150Gb Raptor in my new PC (Win boot partition and FS), along with a 7200 RPM 500GB Caviar SATA-II (3Gb/s) for general storage.My recommendation is no more than 3GB for a WinXP machine...with 4 GB that last GB is unusable by software due to mapping of hardware devices to addresses in the 4Gb address space available to Windows. If you do put in a 3rd gig, buy two 512MB modules the same speed and latency as the originals...just adding a single DIMM would work, but you'd lose your dual channel capability. Also see my post in the FS9 forum w/r/t use of the /3GB switch in the boot.ini configuration.In general I recommend folks start with 2GB, then add another gig if you think you need it. Most do not.RegardsBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VSantiago de Chile