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[Barrington]

Last month I posted a suggested system for your feedback and thanks to many of you I have re-visited the project based on many of your thoughts. Here is what I (and the Computer wizz) have come up with as hopefully, an ideal system for FS9 and FSX.

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 LGA775 - 1333FSB - 4DDR2 slots
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.00GHz 4M 1333MHz LGA 775
Case: Radmax Sagitta Gaming case with SEASONIC M12 700W PSU
Extra Fans: Dual 120mm Blued LED Fans (1 x front, 1 x rear)
Memory: Corsair XMS2, 4 x 1Gb DDR2-800 *XMS2-6400, 4-4-4-12 (4Gig total)
Hard Drive: WESTERN DIGITAL Caviar SE 500GB SATA ll Hard Disk Drive *7200rpm *16MB cache
Video card: ASUS Extreme N8800GTS/HTDP/640M
Floppy Disk: Internal 3.5" USB2 Flash Card Reader
CD Rom: ASUS DRW-1814BLT(SATA) Lightscribe (LS) Drive (can use as normal RW)
Sound Card: Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2235WM 22" WIDESCREEN LCD
Software: Windows XP Home (may upgrade to Vista at a later date).

Before I finally sign off, should this kick butt or what do you see as a a problem?
Once again would really appreciate feedback as I have blown the budget, and just want to get a decent result on both sims..............
Many thanks for your time.

[creator2003]

GIGABYTE

Dont know about these days but this brand had clashes with nivida and other top brand cards ,that could of changed now ?,but other than that look all good .

[frostynz]

I would recommend the same as creator ...... go with ASUS if you can

[Charl]

Again: check the RAM, you need a 64-bit OS for >2GB

[Alex]

QUOTE(Charl @ Sep 7 2007, 04:46 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Again: check the RAM, you need a 64-bit OS for >2GB

I've got 2.5Gb running happily on XP Pro (32-bit). I thought that you only had to run a 64-bit OS if you wanted 4Gb or more...

Alex

[HardCorePawn]

32bit OS's can only address 4gigs of address space...

due to memory mapped devices (ie. DMA mode on HardDrives, Optical Drives, Video Cards etc) sucking up address space... the amount of physical RAM that can be addressed will usually be somewhere between 3gigs and 4... (for the record I think my machine sits around 3.5gigs... 4gigs RAM, +256meg video card, 2 HDD's and DVD-RW)

MS did put out a patch post-"XP SP1", that worked some magic and allowed addressing higher than 4gigs... but due to some poorly written drivers not working too well with this system when loaded above the 4gig limit, they removed it in "XP SP2" to try to improve system stability.

64bit OS's can address something ludicrous like 128Gigs of address space, so effectively your RAM would be limited by the mobo (the most I have seen is a board capable of taking 16Gigs)... unfortunately, a lot, if not all, hardware vendors have very poor support for 64bit drivers... and getting stable audio/video/peripheral drivers is very difficult.

As for brands, I have an Nvidia card working fine with a gigabyte board... The only thing that concerns me about your proposed setup would be the PSU... never heard of Seasonic... I would go with a Silverstone or an Enermax...

and one last note... are you getting that particular DVD burner for the LightScribe capabilities or because its a good solid model? LightScribe really is a useless technology and the LS discs are quite expensive compared to standard blanks.