Hello,After months of reading reviews on various websites and lots and lots of postings on this forum, I am close to narrowing down the configuration for my new computer.This is what I currently am looking at.Intel Core i7-920Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 mainboardOCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600) Gold Low Voltage Triple Channel 6GBScythe Mugen 2 SCMG-2000 CPU coolerWD 300GB 10.000rpm Velociraptor dedicated for FS9WD 300GB 10.000rpm Velociraptor dedicated for FSXSamsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB for Windows 7 + pagefile + office applications + (very) few games.Cooler Master HAF 922 caseWindows 7 64bitFrom my current system, I plan to transfer the following to my new system:Corsair 650Watt PSU Asus EN8800GT-512MB DDR3 graphics card.Samsung Spinpoint F1 640Gb for data storage (photo

CPU: all i7 9 series chips are the same physically, the only difference is electrical. The frequency at which they operate varies from the factory by way of higher or lower CPU multipliers. The higher the model number, the higher the multiplier, the higher the stock frequency. The extreme edition chips have an unlocked multiplier which allows one to overclock without raising the Bclk frequency which overclocks the memory and I/O subsystems as well. RAM: 1600MHz RAM is fine to use for overclocking purposes. Just make sure you buy a triple channel kit that has a CAS latency of 7 or lower and you'll be getting good stuff. HDs: Don't bother with Raptors. They're over-priced and don't offer near enough storage capacity. The only advantage Raptors offer over traditional 7200 RPM drives is latency. If latency is that important then buy an SSD. Otherwise just get a fast 1TB (or larger) drive. I recently purchased an Hitachi 1TB 1000.B drive and have been extremely impressed with it. Samsung's Spinpoint F3 1TB drive is now the fastest 1TB drive on the market and is much less expensive than a Raptor.

HDs: Don't bother with Raptors. They're over-priced and don't offer near enough storage capacity. The only advantage Raptors offer over traditional 7200 RPM drives is latency. If latency is that important then buy an SSD. Otherwise just get a fast 1TB (or larger) drive. I recently purchased an Hitachi 1TB 1000.B drive and have been extremely impressed with it. Samsung's Spinpoint F3 1TB drive is now the fastest 1TB drive on the market and is much less expensive than a Raptor.

Thanks for your response.I agree that the Raptors are not very large compared to the 1+ TB 7200RPM drives on the market. However, I figures that I don't need a 1TB drive for FS. My current FS9 setup takes about 160Gb. Future FSX will be most likely a lot bigger, but I asume that at that time I have either phased out the Raptor for FS9 (giving me an additional 300GB, either in RAID or as a seperate scenery drive).When looking at lots of benchmarks, I get the idea that the Raptor is a great deal faster than any 7200RPM drive. However, I'm not sure I'll benefit from this speed within FS9 / FSX besides the initial startup of the sim.Regards,Frank