1. I've always liked the saitek controllers in the consumer market. Track IR is awesome, but I don't use it anymore because I find it easier to fly using predefined views to switch between instead. For immersion though, it's a great toy. 2. GTX 570 Runs X-Plane 9 fine on a single monitor at that res. Are you going to be using a dual/triplehead2go for the dual monitors? FYI You can't set up multiple viewpoints in x-plane on once pc, so the single viewpoint stretched across 2 monitors is what you'd get. If you push up into dual 1920x1080 you may want to think about a 580 or another card with more VRAM. 3. It will boot quicker, disc I/O isn't a bottleneck though so no improvement at all once in sim. The PC is quite a beast. They key for x-plane 10 is : 1. The fastest cores you can afford. 2. As many cores as you can afford. A solid GPU is also important with enough VRAM, but as a 32bit application, you may not find things exploited fully until a 64bit switch occurs.