I finished assembling my new Flight Sim Box and thought I would share my findings.AMD64 3400+ with all copper Kalman cooling fan/sink.Asus K8V Deluxe M/b1 gig of OCZ Platinum Extended Latency RAM (PC3200)Two Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA 160 Drives These two drives are connected to the K8V's onboard Promise 20378 RAID Controller in a RAID 0 configuration.One Seagate Barracuda Ultra ATA (for Windows)GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (256 mb)TDK DVD-R+/-I did try the SouthBridge VAI RAID controller that is built on the board as well. Throughput was higher on the Promise.I assembled the system and loaded XP64 Beta. Getting the RAID to recognize was a little tricky. You have to have the 64 bit RAID driver on a floppy and use F6 to interupt the initial OS load to add the driver. Once I got this, the install went as a normal Windows XP load. The system was faster than anything I have seen, and I work with some pretty powerful computers at work. Windows seemed to operate as normal, and it was fast. Combat Flight Sim had some triple digit numbers with the vertical sync in the Force Driver turned off. Some screen tearing occured. I think it was because the video card was refresshing faster than the the monitor refresh (ViewSonic set to 100 hertz). Now the bad news, after about three to five minutes of playing, Blue Screen of Death. Not occasionally, everytime. I loaded FS2004, and the game was equally as fast. I set the frame lock to 36 and cranked everything up to max (including traffic). I added mesh terrain, add on scenery and flew the PSS Dash-8. Liquid smooth, but some artifacting and eventually the Blue Screen of Death. I have read some post on why this happens, and lots of things to do to make it better. I decided to blow it away and load XP32. Same performance on both applications, but no crashes. I want to fly a flight sim, so I decided to stay with the 32 bit.To be fair, I installed the XP64 OS on the RAID and made it bootable. If there is a problem with the RAID Driver, the BSOD could have been attributable to that. I did load MS Office and tested it just to see if it worked. (No, I do not load any other apps on my flight sim box. this was just a test.) If the RAID Controller was the problem, I think it would have manifested in these other applications. On CFS3, on both systems, there is still a slight stutter when the flack first starts, like it is loading the sound file into memory (first time only). I is barely noticible, (happens quick) but I am looking at it with a microscope. ( tried reducing the sound acceleration indxdiag. (Does anyone know where to turn the quality down in CFS3? In the previous versions, you could chaged it from 44Khz to 22khz ot even 11khz. I bet this would fix the flack related stutter.) On FS2004, All sliders to max! Finally! Frame rate locked at 32 gives very smooth feel even with add ons. I am going to try SimFlyers Chicago tonight. It could choke a Cray. I am very pleased with the increase in performance over my AMD XP2100+ (1 gig of RAM and 5900 Ultra video card) I am pretty sure it is the FSB and the Hypertransport that does it.I don't really see a reason to start overclocking the Vid Board and Moboard. Works as is. FS2004 was getting some triple digits when looking up in the sky, and around 60 to 70 looking at the ground. I prefer to lock them lower and see the candy. I can not distinguish between 32 and 62 FPS can you?Notes: AGP Fast Write on, AGP Aperture to 256MB, DX (dxdiag) Display AGP Accelleration to On. FS2004 Antialiasing off, VidCard Driver AA to 4X. Any higher causes the panel gauges in the PSS Dash-8 blur) Ansiotrpic Filtering to 4. (any higher looks like crap to me). I did remover MS Messenger. I did turn off "allow indexing" for the two SATA drives. fs9.cfg PanelAsTexture=0. Vitual memory set to 1533MB and placed on the RAID. (seperate partition from FS2004)SummaryIt is fast, I can't imagine there is a big difference from the AMD 64 3200 as I think it is the architecture not the clock speed. (my opinion) All of those who say a 64 bit chip doesn't help 32 bit apps, have obviously not built one. Asus K8V is a good solid board. More drive connections and configurations than anyone, RAID 0, 1, 0+1 for the Promise Controller and RAID 0 and 1 for the VIA controller. You could have a RAID 0+1 for speed and safety for the operating system, and a separate RAID 0 for applications (striped for performance.) Crash Guard Biaos is great for overclockers and tinkerers. You can alsoe connect SATA drives and not configure as a RAID, Two SATA drives in a raid and up to two SATA drives not in a RAID with Two more Ultra ATAs on the EIDE bus. Asus comes through with the flexibility to build it your way. XP64? You will have to get the drivers for most things like video cards and RAID Controllers... They are out there, amd64planet has a list of what is available, and has most of them on the site. Nvidia has a 64 bit driver for the Ultra 5900. XP64 was fast. Did I say that? I did try some 2-D stuff like Watching a DVD and Office. It worked fine. 3D is where it ran into trouble. (Call of Duty died as well). Unless you just want to experiment, I would use the mature XP32. I want to fly more and work on the system less, so I went with the 32.For those who would ask, yes, I overclocked the VidCard and the MoBoard individually and together. From modest to extreme. I cranked it up until it began to artifact. Frames rates did go up (I saw 168FPS in CFS three, but not sustained. What did it get me? The frames shot up, but became less consistant. This causes a distortion in the fluid motion, and for me, detracts form the experience. So again, what did it get me? Some little red numbers on the screen telling me it is faster, but my eyes telling me it looked more real before. I did keep some modest overclocking (Video Card: 922Mhz on the memory clock and I think 485Mhz on the core. Motherboard, all overclocking removed, it ran cooler, and more stable). I will take a steady even 32 frames, with all the bells and whistles, over the surge of MAX FPS. My advice, turn off the frame rate indicator, and enjoy the game with what ever you have. I wrote this article to answer the question, How does FS9 run on the AMD64? Answer: Like silk. Dennis Mitchell

Dennis,congrats on Your system. And just one small remark: It's a good thing You invested in a Promise S-ATA controller. I have a smaller board (Via KT600) which is assumed on some tech boards to have the same inbuilt SATA controller as Your K8V. The inbuilt Controller is quite slow and tends to corrupt data - in fact, killed my system TWICE before I switched to a Sil3112-based add-on S-ATA controller. No problems since then.I hope You get the Blue Screens straight and wish You pleasant flights,Torsten

I was thinking of going the same route, but pretty much been convinced to wait for socket939. Saw talk of a Via 8KT850 that is supposed to provide both AGP and PCIexp video sockets. My problem right now is my system is Win98 and it got very flaky. I got it working better now, but I need to reload. For all that work, might as well go to WinXP Pro, but I don't want to have to hassle with re-activiation on different hardware right away. If MS says no I'm screwed.scott s..