Hi guys..

So I've been asked by a friend at work to spec up a rig for him. He's into flight-sims in a big, big way and so I'm going to spec a gaming rig for him. The sorts of things it will likely need to do is run Flight Simulator X, displaying to either a Head-Mounted-Display OR a 3-screen setup.

So I'm looking to spec (and probably build) a fairly powerful PC within a reasonable budget (£1250), with good graphics capabilities. Two graphics cards are also a priority for the (more if possible) 3 - screen solution.

Anyway here's a provisional build. I'd like your advice on what to change, bearing in mind the budget. He already has the basics (keyboard, mouse and monitor) so I'm just speccing the rig rather the monitors and stuff. Vista will be bought seperately.

Antec case P182 Black Super midi case NO PSU ATX - £116.29
Corsair PSU 550W VX550W ATX12V v2.2 - £72
Gigabyte motherboard EX58-UD3R Intel Core i7 X58 LGA1366 DDR3 ATX - £165.50
Intel CPU Core i7-920 2.66GHz - £241.49
Nexus XiR-3500 Copper edition CPU cooler - about £40 with adapter plate
2 x Sapphire ATi HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E Dual DVI Retail - £372.62
Samsung 1TB Hard Disk Drive Spinpoint F1 SATA II - £79.34
Corsair RAM memory 6GB XMS3 1600MHz DDR3 8-8-8-24 - £164.83
Pioneer DVD DVR-116DBK Black IDE - £20

Total cost - £1272.

Overclocking is definitely NOT needed, he's not into that and the rig will just potter away running flight sims, period. So what I'm looking to do here is purely to spec a good rig within budget.

Cheers! And thanks in advance for any advice!

Why Vista - why not 7?

Besdes that it looks ok....

Quote from Jakg :

Why Vista - why not 7?

Besdes that it looks ok....

It's not out yet, is it?

No, but the beta is - it seems a bit silly to pay for an OS which will be superceeded very soon when the beta of 7 is just as stable as Vista if not moreso and faster to boot.

EDIT - I meant faster in addition, but it's quick at booting too

Cracking info, Jack - I'll have a look around for the beta then

Why not the Radeon 4870X2 instead of 2x Radeon 4870?

Quote from Jakg :

No, but the beta is - it seems a bit silly to pay for an OS which will be superceeded very soon when the beta of 7 is just as stable as Vista if not moreso and faster to boot.

EDIT - I meant faster in addition, but it's quick at booting too

I don't know why but I started cracking up laughing when I read that

Warning: Windows 7 may eat your dog, your life savings and your wife. You may even miss them.

(In all seriousness, the rig looks fine to me, use whatever OS you think your friend will get on with)

EDIT: A 550W PSU for Crossfire 4870's + Core i7? I'd go closer to 700W myself, making sure it's a decent quality one so it can still put out the amps on the 12V rail.

Quote from shiny_red_cobra :

Why not the Radeon 4870X2 instead of 2x Radeon 4870?

Yeah he's gonna need enough DVI outputs to go to 3 monitors. I don't want to spec him a PC that is then limited in some way (number of DVI outputs). If he goes with TH2GO rather than SoftTH then he can make the use of the cards in Crossfire, whereas if he uses SoftTH he can use the DVI outputs.

Quote from Joe_Keaveney :

Yeah he's gonna need enough DVI outputs to go to 3 monitors. I don't want to spec him a PC that is then limited in some way (number of DVI outputs). If he goes with TH2GO rather than SoftTH then he can make the use of the cards in Crossfire, whereas if he uses SoftTH he can use the DVI outputs.

Crossfire is .. eh. With an x2 instead of 2 x ... you can use all 4 dvi (afaik) w/o softh or expensive th2go.