RSharpe

Your HOTAS is backwards!

+1 I find a buy a lot more games because I have a reliable and relatively secure system easily accessible. Steam sales are great, especially for older games that no longer have the at launch hype.

Most of those pre-built water cooling units are LOUD. I'd get something like the Noctua NH-D14, which is just as cool, and a hell of a lot quieter at load. I have the same case as you, and it's massive enough to accommodate the cooler. I have the smaller Noctua NH-U12P, and I run my i7 920 at 4.0ghz 24/7.

Don't mean to derail things, but I thought that the best image quality and colour reproduction monitors today still tend to be CCFL backlit. Most M/PVA and IPS panels are still CCFL backlit, and the LED backlit monitors are typically the cheaper TN panels. Also. Regardless of backlighting, all monitors these days are are generally LCD.

It doesn't really look like an all new engine. Are just adding features to this really old engine? I really hope this one is 64 bit and is optimized for multi-core CPUs. It's a shame that the interviewer failed to ask any useful questions at all.

I think a single 6950 will be really underpowered for what you want to do.

I'm not liking the ACOG reticle... Why do they have to dumb it down? I'm guessing BF3 isn't built for long ranged engagements like the ARMA series.

A well designed heatsink and good fans can outperform sealed off-the-shelf water cooling units. All the water does it take the heat from the CPU to a cooling surface. Whether you have a radiator or a heat sink, and whether that heat is transmitted by water tubes or heat pipes, heat still going to be cooled in the same way... pushing cool air over a cooling surface. Heatsink coolers like those high end designs by Noctua and Thermalright can cool better, more efficiently, and quieter than those consumer water cooling kits. They're often packaged with better fans too. Noctuas are constantly silent. The difference can be something like 25db.

I've always seen the single player campaigns as a jump off point. Sort of demo missions using stock units and weapons. The strength in the real Operation Flashpoint and ARMA series has always been in the open ended user generated modding and mission making.

Or you could use a Noctua NH-D14, which will be cooler and quieter than those off the shelf liquid cooling solutions.

You'll be losing out. Unlike the marginal performance gains from previous generations of CPUs, the last couple CPU lines from Intel were built with serious overclocking potential.

The Western Digital Caviar Black drives are quite good.

For someone who is buying new components from scratch and not reusing old components, your RAM selection is the most bizarre thing I've seen anyone make. I still don't understand why you would buy a triple channel kit designed for and X58 motherboard for a Sandy Bridge system.

This is going to bring SLIed GTX 580s to their knees.

Even F-19 would have been beyond the capabilities of CGA graphics!

Hahahaha

Short of the power supply, storage and video card, you should probably think of starting over and upgrading everything else, including your O/S. Even the video card could stand being upgraded.

I don't go around unplugging and plugging my monitors while my computer is on, but I have three 24" 1920x1200 monitors and one 46" 1080p HDTV connected to my two 580s, and I can tell you that Nvidia's drivers/Windows 7 sometimes has trouble detecting the displays when I'm turning them on and off in Nvidia control panel. Pick the output you want your monitor to use and reboot and the system should detect properly.

Check out what EtherealN wrote about data density. A slower rpm, high density HDD can be as fast or even faster than a 7200rpm drive of lower density. I personally buy a lot of "green" 5400rpm drives for data storage for movies and music, and I have SSDs and 7200rpm drives for applications and the OS. Along with my SSD, my 2 2TB, 2 1.5TB drives are 5400, and I have a 1TB and 750GB 7200rpm drives, and some smaller backup HDDs in an external box.

That's not true. A lot of drives are 5400rpm, especially high density HDDs these days that are geared for storing lots of data, rather than running OSes and applications. At least half of HDDs that I have a 5400rpm, and the other half 7200rpm.

The only difference I've found between 270.51 and 270.61 is that 270.61 is not glitchy detecting monitors when switching to SLI surround. That's a big welcome fix for me.

Build your own

See http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=72402

You won't need THtG if you get a a 6xxx series AMD card(s), the Nvidia 590, or 5xx SLIed to run a triple monitor setup

I haven't been able to try everything, but so far, it feels pretty much the same as the 270.51 beta drivers to me.