I'm looking at buying an Alienware system (I know building yourself can be cheaper but I'm looking at financing and that's not available with that route).Primary reason for the PC is FSX - I want something that will run detailed aircraft over ORBX scenery with lots of weather and traffic at good framerates basically. I also play World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2, plus add Diablo 3 whenever it comes out.Just have a few questions and need some advice on a few things....For processors I'm looking at either...Overclocked Intel® Core™ i7 980x Extreme Six Core Processor (4.0GHz, 12MB Cache) orOverclocked Intel® Core™ i7 980x Extreme Six Core Processor (3.73GHz, 12MB Cache) Is the 4ghz over 3.73 going to give me a big difference?For Ram I'm looking at 12GB probably - is 1600mhz that much better than 1333?Video cards I've long been an nvidia fan but if ATI is on top of the game I can switch, which card is better?Single 2GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 orSingle 1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 480 Will a crossfire or SLI setup hinder FSX? I believe it wont' help but I play other games that would take advantage so would having dual cards hurt my FSX performance?For the hard drives I'm looking at...600GB RAID 0 (2x 300GB SATA-II, 10k RPM, 16MB Cache HDDs) Again RAID 0 afaik won't help FSX but does for other stuff - again would it hurt me to have it?Just curious any other thoughts people have (other than build your own, again not an option unless newegg offers financing lol).

Regarding ram, if it´s for FSX only, 6 GB is all you need, and more. 12 gigz if you work heavily with video editing and photoshopping. Of course go for 1600 Mhz, Mushkin Redline have the lowest CAS latency of 6. I can recommend those. FSX seems to favour geforce cards. Don´t know how much SLI will do. Before the 400-series cards it was mosly agreed on that SLI would even reduce FSX performance. But I´ve seen more and more posts on 400-series cards in SLI, that seem to work well. If you´re not going for a three screen or more setup I´d say two 480´s is overkill and VERY power consuming (and you could heat your home with them :Just Kidding: ). The 460s are more power saving and seem to get good reviews, and are overclock friendly. I´d concider a SLI with two of those.

Don't use RAID, it kills FSX performance unless you are using a controller card which I doubt. Get an SSD for FSX dedicated drive and a 600GB for the OS/other games and programs. Go with the GTX480 over the 5970, better for FSX. Finally, don't pay the extra for an OC when you can do it yourself.

Ya decided to ditch alienware altogether and just build myself. I'm prob going with an i7 950 since it's a third of the price of the 980, I can upgrade later.

Hi according to an article by Doug Horton in the Feb/march edition of computer pilot: with an I7 975 you get 44 FPS at 3.7 Ghz and 47 FPS at 4.0 Ghz on his benchmarking scenario.