Just finished putting it together and it actually works.    Setup advice gladly accepted. Specs of the machine I should have gotten but didn't, not welcome.   I got what I could afford and it took some time to get everything I needed together.

Pentium 4, 2.8 Ghz Hyperthreading
ASUS P4P8X-SE MB (should have waited for Pci Express)
1 G of PC3200 DDR RAM
SATA 120 GB drive
Lite On CD RW, DVD R/RW
Radion 9800 Pro 256mb
Onboard Sound for now but I have a real good card ordered.

Downloading Everest now. I have a benchmarking utility on my old computer but it's for AMD processors only. Came with the processor.

Found out last night that my CD/DVD drive is bad. Works OK playing DVDs but when I tried to copy files over it took almost an hour to copy one 750 mb CD. The window I was copying from kept freezing and it even rebooted the computer once. Looks like another trip to Circuit City come Monday.

Everything else works great. I installed FS 2004 and tried a test flight in the Flight One ATR from JFK. I was getting around 23+ FPS out over the bay (Locked at 25) and it dropped down to 18 FPS on approach but even with the slowest frame rates it's still very smooth.

Really wish now that I'd waited to get the MB so I could get PCI Express but it seems to be strong enough without that for right now. Maybe later for an upgrade.