[louisv]

I'm a retired software engineer living all by myself, but in a very active and creative area of Montreal.
I used to fly Piper Cherokees when I was young (a while ago... when one hour flying with gas and insurance was $18...) and I've been building this system for a couple of months now: I went all out for CoD and DCS.

Antec 1200 case, Ultra 850w ps
Velociraptor 600Gigs
Intel i7 980x 3.46 GHz (not OC'd yet), Megahalem cooler
12 gigs Mushkin 6-8-6-24-1T 1600Mhz DDR3 Triple channel
EVGA gtx580 (currently at the airport, will be here tomorrow !!!)
EVGA X58 FTW3 Mobo
HP ZR24W 1920X1200 IPS Monitor
Trackir 4
Thrustmaster Hotas Warthog
Saitek Pro-Flight rudder pedals
Windows 7 64

No SSDs (yet), just one 580 (for now). So I hope to see most of the eye candy...

For those who have never assembled a system by themselves, for such a system you save about 50% as compared to the equivalent Alienware (Dell) for instance. This is not true for smaller systems. For budget systems it will cost you more if you do it yourself !

One could go ballistic (maybe one day !!!): As long as games are multi-threaded and 64 bits you can take advantage of this:

EVGA Workstation SR-2 mobo with two 6 core Xeons (that's 24 threads, the Xeon is functionnaly equivalent to the 980x but with double QPI).
2X12= 24 gigs of triple channel memory, which becomes 12 Gigs of hexachannel memory when driven by two CPUs.
Along with a RAID-0 array of SSDs this would be awesome to say the least, but currently about $10,000 (CDN) if you do it yourself. BTW the SR-2 is built to be overclocked...with triple gtx580 also OC'd, it should run flight sims (or a medium sized country) for a while...

Lou