Hi all - I am trying to make a decision here before I make a purchase from Alienware. I built two systems on line with exactly the same components,I7 930 o'c12 GB RAMDual Nvidia 460 1GBWin 7 64bit Ultimate1 TB Raid Drive.Is there any reason to pay $600 or $700 more just to go with an Area 51 machine over the Aurora considering they have the same components? Thanks for the help!!!!Richard

Don't really know Alienware, but I heard they are way overpriced. Besides:12GB of RAM? Why? You aren't doing professional video and photo editing, are you? For FSX you will never ever need more than 6GB of RAM. Even if you have the heaviest and all the addons there are. And you will minimize the possibility of an overclock. Something FSX virtually depends on. Put a stock 980x in and I will kill its performance with my [email protected] any day.SLI also doesn't make sense. Beside one or two FPS more, and higher IQ with same speed you will have no advantage at running a SLI for flight simulator. Get GTX580. Much better choice.RAID? Errm... no. Either you have a really good (expensive) controller card (I don't believe Alienware is building computers with 200€+ controller cards) off of which you run RAID, but having MOBO-Raid is worse than having two single drives, according to some real professionals around here. I tested it once, and I can confirm that it was worse than my WD Velociraptor.If you want a really screamer machine for FSX, you should see through threads here what people mostly buy and build the computer yourself. You will get help enough around here.

Don't really know Alienware, but I heard they are way overpriced. Besides:12GB of RAM? Why? You aren't doing professional video and photo editing, are you? For FSX you will never ever need more than 6GB of RAM. Even if you have the heaviest and all the addons there are. And you will minimize the possibility of an overclock. Something FSX virtually depends on. Put a stock 980x in and I will kill its performance with my [email protected] any day.SLI also doesn't make sense. Beside one or two FPS more, and higher IQ with same speed you will have no advantage at running a SLI for flight simulator. Get GTX580. Much better choice.RAID? Errm... no. Either you have a really good (expensive) controller card (I don't believe Alienware is building computers with 200€+ controller cards) off of which you run RAID, but having MOBO-Raid is worse than having two single drives, according to some real professionals around here. I tested it once, and I can confirm that it was worse than my WD Velociraptor.If you want a really screamer machine for FSX, you should see through threads here what people mostly buy and build the computer yourself. You will get help enough around here.

Thanks for the response, I went ahead and purchased the Area 51, I did take out the Raid drive, but went with everything else. I thought about buying the components and assembling them but time is not in abundant supply right now. Can't wait to fire up FSX and Lock On!!

Well, good luck with it!