Here is the system I'm seriously contemplating:1 - Intel Core i7-2600K1 - GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD4-B3 LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX2 - Western Digital VelociRaptor WDBACN6000ANC-NRSN 600GB 10000 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s1 - Asus VK278Q Black 27" 1920x1080 2ms Full HD HDMI LED BackLight LCD1 - LG Black 10X BD-ROM 4MB1 - EVGA SuperClocked 012-P3-1572-AR GeForce GTX 570 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR51 - G.SKILL Ripjaws X + Turbulence II Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 | Designed for Intel P671 - CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-850TX 850W ATX12V v2.2 / EPS12V v2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified1 - Thermaltake VL200L1W2Z NVIDIA Edition Black and Green Lining ATX Full TowerAll this hits roughly $2500 with shipping from Newegg.My current rig is quite outdated but still preforms well enough:Q9550 2.83Ghz / 4GB DDR2 800 / 8800GT OC'ed / 2TB+ Storage / Win 7 Ult 64 Anyone see anything they would change? If so, why?Thanks for reading.

Seems to be a nice setup. The RAM is a real killer! :(

Wow~~~ I suggest you not place the order until NGX enters BETA. Maybe they'll be a little bit cheaper then. Do not prepare a computer at home for it so early. I heard some guys even bought computer for NGX a year ago, and now.... It's so sad.

I bought one a year ago this month. Now its time to upgrade again. Lucky for me i only have to update the CPU, MOBO.

I also upgraded a year ago, assuming the NGX would be out soon. Oh well. I'm tired of throwing money at FSX, anyway. After MS Flight comes out I'll probably upgrade. But anyway to the OP: If I were buying a system today I'd try to fit an SSD into my budget.

Thanks for all the reply's. I'm not in a big hurry to press buy just yet, kinda wanting to hold out unit the next Intel tech release but if the NGX drops real soon I will be getting this.

I also upgraded a year ago, assuming the NGX would be out soon. Oh well. I'm tired of throwing money at FSX, anyway. After MS Flight comes out I'll probably upgrade. But anyway to the OP: If I were buying a system today I'd try to fit an SSD into my budget.

I agree, an SSD would be nice. How dependable are the mid to high end SSD's, I remember hearing that data loss and formats were common. In order for it to be worth it, I need at least a 256GB and those are pricey for a good one. Any suggestions?

Hmm chuck fsx and OS on SSD. And everything else on ya standard 7200 drive. Assuming FSX is ya ... Life. Probably 256gb too much. And very expensive. Now as for brand I hear good things from Corsair force series. But you just gotta do research as I did couple months back. But tech changes fast. But yes SSD is a must for people willing to drop the paper. OP- get 2500k, 8gb will not have any positive impact for FSX, HDD discussed, GTX 560 would be bang for buck if anything like it's cousin GTX 460. This should save you nice lump of $

1 - Asus VK278Q Black 27" 1920x1080 2ms Full HD HDMI LED BackLight LCD

These days I would personally be looking for a monitor that is Nvidia 3D - ready.

I'd get the Asus P8P67 board in lieu of the Gigabyte one - ASUS seems to be the best this time with the P67s. They have that super slick UEFI firmware too.

Hmm chuck fsx and OS on SSD. And everything else on ya standard 7200 drive. Assuming FSX is ya ... Life. Probably 256gb too much. And very expensive. Now as for brand I hear good things from Corsair force series. But you just gotta do research as I did couple months back. But tech changes fast. But yes SSD is a must for people willing to drop the paper. OP- get 2500k, 8gb will not have any positive impact for FSX, HDD discussed, GTX 560 would be bang for buck if anything like it's cousin GTX 460. This should save you nice lump of $

Thanks for the advice. My current FSX install with REX2 HD eats up more than 45GB of space and I have more addon's that I want to get eventually. 256GB may seem like more than needed but I prefer to have plenty of room on my OS drive and FSX isn't my only passion or hobby on the PC. 8GB of RAM will be very useful to me, I understand FSX will not address more than 4. Regarding the vid card, I'm not sure it's worth saving the $100 here, the 570 seems like the card to buy. I'll need to do some research and see the how they compare. I believe the 570 will benefit me more especially at 1920x1080 res. If I was staying down around 1680x1050 then the 560 is probably a better buy. I'm still not completely sold on the SSD's and think I might be one of the slow adopters. $650 for 1 - 256GB SSD or $580 for 2 - 10,000 RPM 600GB Raptors. The SSD might crush the raptors but damn...

These days I would personally be looking for a monitor that is Nvidia 3D - ready.

I thought about this but the prices are a bit crazy still plus this build is already $2500!! By the time I get interested in 3D gaming/computing the prices should be more reasonable.

I'd get the Asus P8P67 board in lieu of the Gigabyte one - ASUS seems to be the best this time with the P67s. They have that super slick UEFI firmware too.

Ahh, very good to know and thanks for the heads up. Ever since the Core2 days I've had Gigabyte MB's on the brain. Looks like I need to do some more reading up.Thanks Ryan.P.S.I see you're burning that late night oil Ryan, hope you didn't waste to much time replying to this thread. I don't want to take you away from buttoning up that thing you're working on.. what was it again?

2 - Western Digital VelociRaptor WDBACN6000ANC-NRSN 600GB 10000 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s I have always heard look at a 64MB Cache and it will improve performance as well.

Alright, I see you're obviously ready to throw down on a pretty high-end system, so here's my 2 cents...Hard Drives:Honestly I wouldn't even bother with a 10,000 rpm drive. We have tried FSX on an SSD and seen that it provides absolutely no benefit for FPS. The 10,000 rpm drive just means more noise. I would just pick up a 1TB Spinpoint F3 instead as they can be found under $60. That should save you something on the order of $450... there's your SSD! Go pick up a 240-256GB Sata III SSD or pocket the money. I will say that I love my SSD as my OS and program files drive. I run FSX on the mechanical drive. Also, I believe the newest generation of SSDs can now be found which have ~500MB/s read/write (up from ~350).Final Recommendation:1 x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB1 x 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 (or equivalent)$aved: ~? (maybe a $20 loss over your VelociRaptors)CPU:With regards to performance on FSX today, I don't think the extra $100 for the 2600k warrants itself in any way. You could argue that you want to be ready for Microsoft Flight, but then I would recommend selling the i5-2500k and replacing it with an Ivy Bridge CPU when they're released.Final Recommendation:i5-2500k$aved: ~100MOBO:If you're not in a huge hurry to build, wait until May 8th for the release of the new Z68 motherboards. It's very likely that they will provide no benefit for FSX specifically. It's important to consider that Z68 is what P67 should have been from the very beginning and if you're buying a new computer now, there's no reason not to have the latest and greatest. If you end up going with a Gigabyte P67, I really do think the UD5 is worth the extra money unless you're on a really tight budget.RAM:There's a good chance you will not actually be able to run that memory at 2133 on current motherboards. Even if you do, it will not a have a very big impact on FSX frame rates. You might be better off saving $50 by picking up some 2000MHz memory and trying to overclock it to 2133. If that's unsuccessful, you will have to run it at 1866. Consider this or this.Final Recommendation:2x4GB Mushkin 2000 (9-11-9-27)$aved: ~50

2 - Western Digital VelociRaptor WDBACN6000ANC-NRSN 600GB 10000 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s I have always heard look at a 64MB Cache and it will improve performance as well.

Thanks for the reply. Western Digital doesn't make a 10,000 RPM 600GB Raptor with 64MB of cache as far as I know. The reason you are seeing large 64MB cache now is for the higher density drives 2TB+. I'm no expert but there are a lot of factors that go into HDD performance and cache is only one small part. For the home PC enthusiast, these Raptors are about as fast as you get for mechanical drives. Next step is SSD.

Honestly I wouldn't even bother with a 10,000 rpm drive. We have tried FSX on an SSD and seen that it provides no benefit for FPS. The 10,000 rpm drive just means more noise. I would just pick up a 1TB Spinpoint F3 instead as they can be found under $60. That should save you something on the order of $460... there's your SSD! Go pick up a 256GB Sata III SSD.

We all know FPS in FSX is CPU intensive so faster drives won't really boost FPS but they will help load data faster. The drives are for everyday OS tasks plus the many other Apps I run and will give me a little over 1TB of well performing physical hard disks with a much higher reliability than SSD. I prefer stable reliable speed versus SSD and I'm not ready to part with $2.34/GB. I know there are cheaper SSD's but why buy them?

I'd get the Asus P8P67 board in lieu of the Gigabyte one - ASUS seems to be the best this time with the P67s. They have that super slick UEFI firmware too.

Never heard anything bad about the Gigabyte boards, on the contrary, Asus was a disaster at launch due to the BIOS problems, with the Bios updates, its all stable now. I heard Gigabyte offer great tech support, especially in the Uk, I heard the clock slightly better than the Asus too, EFI Bios is only a visual change so it isn't an "upgrade" as such. MSI GD65 gets a great review and also seems to clock slightly higher. Each to there own, there are no bad choice betweem Asus, GB or MSI.I have an Asus deluxe, I love it, I only ordered it because it was the most popular choice with others so overclocking guides and support would be easy. Of the 3 systems I built with Asus, one of them (the latest B3 model), won't boot if I install the Intel rapid storage tech driver from the CD that comes with the board, found this out 3 windows installs later. If I were to buy again from scratch, I would go with the GD65.

We all know FPS in FSX is CPU intensive so faster drives won't really boost FPS but they will help load data faster. The drives are for everyday OS tasks plus the many other Apps I run and will give me a little over 1TB of well performing physical hard disks with a much higher reliability than SSD. I prefer stable reliable speed versus SSD and I'm not ready to part with $2.34/GB. I know there are cheaper SSD's but why buy them?

$/GB is irrelevant - it's all about $/performance. You pay for performance just like you do for capacity. If you move all your libraries (my pictures, my videos, my music, etc) over to a standard 7200 rpm drive, you shouldn't need a crap-ton of super fast storage. Running a couple $75 HDDs in raid to get good cheap performance makes sense, but avoiding an SSD by running a couple $290 drives in raid is nuts. Sure you will have more storage space, but it will still be much slower, much hotter, and much noisier than an SSD. I don't know where you're pulling this reliability stuff from... but how long are you planning on relying on any of this hardware anyhow? I give it 3 to 4 years before it's all completely outdated anyway! Don't forget that running HDDs in raid is also going to increase the potential for errors.