bo3bber

Also, what resolution are you planning to run FSX at? Surround setup or stereoscopic? The destination resolution would change my recommendation. I have the Oculus Rift DevKit, and the resolution makes it unusable at present. Consumer version might help, but it's a long road to getting FSX working there.

First off, let me say that your build is a fine machine, and should run FSX nicely. Second off, you can do better in most parts of your build if you like, and mostly your machine is more expensive than it needs to be. I don't think you will need two GTX 780 cards, unless you are planning to run stereoscopic, or surround mode. For 1st person, and racing, there is almost nothing that will spin up a dual 780 setup, unless you are doing very high resolution, surround, or stereoscopic. I'm a big fan of stereoscopic, NVidia 3D Vision is extremely impressive with the right games. Unfortunately FSX runs only OK in stereoscopic, it has glitches with lights like runway lights and hazard lights. I have a way to disable them altogether, which works nicely for day flying. Especially for FSX what matters is CPU, not GPU. And it's clock speed, not cores. FSX is not multi-threaded enough to matter. It's old code, and it's single core for the most part. Also, I wouldn't go with a Haswell chip for this setup- the Haswell is really designed with low power tablet systems in mind, and at present the older Ivy Bridge chips are going to be better suited for your needs, and will overclock better and easier. See this link for a detailed look: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/haswell_review_2013 You are on the right track with the SSD drive. This is a key to making it perform smoothly and load quickly. I think you could use the Samsung 840 as it is not quite as expensive and performs at least as well. I would also not go that high on the PSU. 1100W is waaay too much PSU for this rig, especially if you go with Haswell. The GTX780 is much more efficient than the older 285 or 580 series. Your power consumption here will be fairly modest, even under full load. On the order of 600W when overclocking. See this sizing site for actual consumption: http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp Just for another comparison point, here is an elite build from MaximumPC: http://www.maximumpc.com/build_pc_recommended_builds_july_2013 Let me know if you have any questions, I can fill in gaps as need be.

Does Hanggliding count? It's been a long time, but my log book says I have 204 take offs and landings. Hours as a metric is not as significant for a Hangglider. B) I'm a complete FSX noob, and just starting playing around with it a month ago or so. (Trying to fix stereoscopic bugs) Not sure if Hanggliding helped or it's just that easy, but flying the early missions I put it in "real-life" mode, and successfully did the first 7 missions without any mistakes or breaking the airframe. Tried a Jet mission (Amsterdam to London) and could never eyeball it correctly. I'd land but never actually on the runway. Plenty of crashed planes. I didn't know how to back up, so I just drove forward through the terminal to get to the runway. As long as you don't hit a ground vehicle it doesn't care. Lots and lots of hours playing videogames- so I approached the landing like a video game instead, and used the magic boxes on the flight deck (sorry, no idea what they are called) to make a good landing. Just for grins I didn't read up on any of the instruments and just tried to figure it out from context. Anyway, hope that was amusing. ^_^

Agreed. Really appreciate the commentary and the ideas. Pretty sure that every hour of watching CNN cost you 3 IQ points. Much more direct and accurate speculation here. Question from the peanut gallery: What are flight rules for a long flight like this, 11 hours? How do they handle the impact of sleep and fatigue?

Some high resolution photos directly from NTSB. http://www.flickr.com/photos/68618467@N03/sets/72157634528378705/