Hi, I'm just about to have a new system built for me which will incude an Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, 2mb of Corsair TwinX XMS2 DDR2 800 (PC6400) memory. I originally specified a core 2 Duo E6700 CPU with a 10,000 rpm 150gb Western Digital HD for flight sim use and a 300gb 7200rpm HD for general use, however it has been sugested to me by the system builder that I will get better performance (at about the same price) if I went for an E6600 CPU with 2x150gb HDs in a sriped array for flight sim plus the 300gb for other use. Any advice greatly appreciated.Pete.

Hi Pete, I have an E6600, ASUS P5B deluxe, not overclocked ,Creative X-FI Extrememusic, an NVIDIA XFX 8800GTS (Forceware 97.92 WHQL) , 2 Gb GEIL DDR2 800 memory and one SEAGATE 320 SATA II, with the Intel Matrix Storage Driver (no RAID, AHCI enabled), and FSX runs very well (stock aircrafts, of course).You

I like your original configuration better.I'd stick with the E6700...the striped array will have little noticeable effect on FS, where every bit of CPU speed counts for something, especially if planning on FSX.CheersBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VSantiago de Chile

Thanks for the replies. That's what I thought too Bob, cheers.Pete.

. . also I believe that the bus speed multiplier is not locked with the 6700: it is locked at 9 in the 6600. (Not that I'm complaining!) I've seen come claims of 3.4 GHz with the 6600, but I get good performance in FSX with mine set up to 3.0, using the ATI tools and cpuz.

Yes, and RAID 0 is something to be wary of too. Whilst hard drives are getting more reliable by the year, you can have other hiccups that can blow your RAID array. Case in point is my three month old RAID 0 setup was suddenly gone when booting up one day. One of the drives knew it was half of an array, but the other seemed to be suffering amnesia. In the end I had to reformat and reinstall everything. I ended up going two separate drives, running Win XP off the first and FS anything off the second. HDD performance is subjectively about the same as it was with the RAID setup, so no loss in performance. An added bonus is that I now cross backup important data between the two drives, so I get the benefit of a partial mirror setup and the space advantage of individual drives.BTW, if you are not into overclocking, then your original config would be the one I would go for too.Gary

Many thanks for that info Gary, I guess I'll be sticking to my original config. I notice from your system specs that you have 3gb of RAM installed, would you know if that gives a significant performance increase over the 2gb I intend to have?Many thanks,Pete.

No, it performs no better than the 2G I had previously with either FS9 or FSX. The reason I bought it is this rig will eventually move over to Vista and from what I read of this new OS you need 1G to keep the OS from digging into your game RAM reserves. In the past I've waited until later to add the extra RAM, then find I can't purchase stuff that matches my original (because technology and product lines move on), so this time I bought it early in anticipation of the later move.Gary