After many weeks of research and $2145 in peices and parts, I finally put together my "Dream System"ASUS A8NSLI DeluxeAMD Athlon 64 4000+Leadtek Geforce 6800 Ultra 256mb (one card)2 gigs Corsair RamEnermax 535 SLI ready PSUWD 36 gig 10,000 Raptor HDD (no RAID) (Maybe later)Seagate 80 gig Sata for FSCOF and ??all this into a Lian-Li 6070B Plus Case(Amazing case - has ducted exhaust fans with ducts over cpu and graphics card(s)Hyundai 19" 8ms refresh LCD MonitorJust finished it yesterday and I am amazed that everything is working - no duds!This was my first complete build. I have upgraded systems for years. I sat there for a full ten minutes with finger on the start button before I could get up the nerve to push it!Just tried out FS and with everything maxed out except Autogen (don't want trees in my runway) with FPS locked at 35 - I am getting 31 to 34 fps with Real Air Spit at Real Air's Spitfire West Malling scenery flight.Very pleased so far. I priced a comparable system (except case) at Alienware, ABS, and several others at $3489 to $4600. Case and PSU ordered from Xoxide.comEverything else from Newegg One thing, minor, How do you get the Sata boot disk to run the HDD LED? If I can figure that out I'll be 100% happy!Dave "Leafhopper" Sheridan

Well congratulations. Only problem with "dream" systems is that they don't stay that way for long - 6 months from now your $2100 investment will be an $800 average system :-)As for the SATA problems - could be a mobo glitch. SATA is still pretty new and I also have some problems with it on my FN95 mobo.

Appears to be a nice system you put together. Plus I'm sure you got the satisfaction of building it yourself and it's nice know exactly what you have 'under the hood'.Only thing I would suggest is start saving your money for a 76GB Rapter HD. If you collect addons you'll eat up the 36GB really fast. ;)

that is what the 80 Gig SATA is for ;). I know people who thinks 300 Gig is to small but can

That's right, FS9 is on the 80 gig SATA. I rarely see the hardrive accessed and with 2 gig of RAM, I think I'm okay for a while. The Lian-Li case has a dust filter (washable) so hopefully it will help keep the leadtek cooler clean. I may opt to purchase a Zalman Tower water cooler if things get too warm. Which brings up a question, I have searched for the operating temperature ranges for the Athlon 64 4000+ and haven't found any. Mine has the stock heatsink and fan but I think it is running a little hot - up to 55 degrees C under a load. I would feel more comfortable with it in the 40's but not sure what it is supposed to be. AMD should be including adequate cooling but you never know.As to SLI, I am waiting to see what FS10? can take advantage of. The cpu is hyperthreading ready also. This will have to last me a few years although I can upgrade pieces every once in while.This system is so quiet I can hardly hear it - some of that is the case as it is acoustically dampered also.I was concerned about no HDD led but when the Raptor kicks in, I can hear that!I have never been so pleased with a system before. This handles everything I throw at it - Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, IL2FB, and CFS3 almost runs (nothing can run that sim!)Just got the Audio FX Headset from e-dimensional today. Now, that'll rattle your brain! I think ears lost at least 10 ounces of fat today alone. Well worth the $49.95 - best headset I ever had, and comfortable, too!Next is Voice Buddy, and Track IR with Vectoring.In case anyone is wondering, I am now retired and need something to occupy some of my slack time - that is, if the wife allows any!!I am thinking seriously about fabricating a homebuilt cockpit (of sorts) a generic GA (up to twin engine) which will fold up out of the way when not in use - small enough to not get in the way. I have been tinkering around with a couple of design ideas that would include 3 LCD monitors 19" for virtual cockpit views - not heavy into instruments, just VFR. So I won't have a whole lot of slack time, I guess.Dave (Leafhopper) Sheridan

55C is quite normal when using stock cooling. I've seen AMD's hit the 70C range with the included HSF. As long as you're not overclocking this shouldn't cause any problems.I would definitely make sure FS9 and Windows are installed on the Raptor. Does wonders for the boot time and FS9 startup time :)I have one 74GB Raptor and one 160GB Maxtor and I just ran out of space. Ordered an external HDD cage so I can reinstall my old 120GB drive as well...not sure how long those 350GB's total will be last though. Sometimes I wish all three drives would just crash so I can start over without all the junk that's accumulated over the years :-lol

TrackIR with vector is your first priority really :). After that get your stereo3d glasses to comp with it. I like voice buddy as well though it would have been perfect if it had used AT&T:s voice package instead of MS synthetic ones.As for the Raptor you can always run the scenery from it and everything else on your SATA drive :). That is especially if you have photorealistic scenery which takes it times to load. Will also help keeping things organized. I have always like 0,5 % defragmentation on my scenery partition so never have to defrag it really. Guess you can have the aircraft folder on a separate partition as well though don

Oh and about the 4000+. It

I'm getting close to thinking about building my own, but don't let the payware folks see this thread.Some are under the mistaken impression it's cheaper to buy an add-on than it is to get great frame rates on the latest system. So the next time a thread about a payware item being cheaper than a night out, I hope they consider the cost of the system into that calculation to make that add-on run at a respectable smoothness. ;-)Looks like a great system build. congratulations.I haven't heard of Xoxide before, how were they to work with and pricing?I will most likely wait until FS10 hits the street and see some benchmarking before I upgrade. I did recently grab a 9600XT, new PSU (450w), and another 512 of ram to boost me up to one gig. Thanks for posting and I've bookmarked it too. Also thanks for disclosing the true cost of flightsimming. :-)Regards,JoeGrab My FREEWARE Voice recognition Profiles here:[a href=http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fs2004misc&DLID=58334]Cessna 172 Voice Profile[/a][a href=http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fs2004misc&DLID=60740]FSD Avanti Voice Profile[/a].You will need the main FREEWARE Flight Assistant program to use it, get it here:[a href=http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=genutils&DLID=39661]Flight Assistant 2.2[/a]

They are not the cheapest but have some great custom built stuff :).However looking through that page I see that nventiv is reborn under the new name ECT :).Look at extreme cooling techniques :). I was quite close getting one of those when they went bank rupt (nventiv) but now obviously another company have bought their products and technology. They are more pricey than ever though :(

Thanks for the reply re the 4000+ temp range. I'll rest a little easier now. I did the upgrade route for years but a few months ago the MoBo on on my other system died (well, actually I killed it by trying to replace the cpu fan - darn spring steel clips). So I replace that and if you can do that you may as well build one from scratch.I don't overclock - don't need to with this set up - everything is smooth as silk (except CFS3 - as noted above). This cpu, as I understand it actually overclocks itself if demand is high enough. Guess I'll never know for sure as there is no indication of anything going on.Dave

Xoxide was great to order from. I e-mailed some questions regarding cases and they responded the next day. Everything I ordered arrived in good shape and timely.As for disclosing the true cost of flight simming...hmmm! I don't even know how much I have spent since FS? (dos). I buy a few payware packages, RealAir SF260 and Spitfire, and everything I can from Bill and Lynn Lyons - I love their packages - lots of goodies and surprises. Oh, yeah, I don't think I included the cost of the Hyundai L90D 19" monitor - that was $378 plus shipping from TigerDirect (very happy with that too!). I've read that the 9600XT is a good card. I strongly considered the 800X (think that was it, the new one, anyway). I'm not sure that the GeForce 6800 Ultra will outperform it - maybe not - customer loyalty won out!450W should be good for a while as far as psu's go, but with SLI, two cards and with fans galore I felt a 535 watt was safe enough. Also, the SLI require two 12V dedicated rails and this PSU had them, plus the 24 pin power connector required by the ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe.Good luck!Dave "Leafhopper" Sheridan

Don

Two Leadtek GeForce 6800 Ultras will fit - the board is laid out nicely with lots of room.Dave

Nice :). However I am a bit worried about the space between. The leadtek fan is quite weak and if it get to close to the other card it will in reality be passively cooled.But anyway I am not to impressed with SLI really. Also if you want SLI you would make best in buying two video cards now because the 6800 ULTRA is rumoured to go out of production very soon if it hasn