Hi flyboy583
i have a system from overclockers,the “Titan Spinosaur” Intel Core i5 2500K 3.30GHz @ 4.60GHz DDR3 Sandybridge System which almost the same as your system 3 but with a Geforce GTX 570 graphics card.As you i play mostly flight Sims and for that its the graphics card that makes the difference.
Beware the price from overclockers doesn’t include windows and if you include that something like a Geforce GTX 460 your looking at @£715 if you unselect the overclocking but then you have to add delivery.

As i said i have had my system since Easter and it is brilliant and have no problems recommending overclockers to anyone

Theres a Easter sale on till the 26th at the Rise of Flight store

http://riseofflight.com/en/store

some very nice shots there TEEJ

1 question what lens?

i have a canon 350D and have just sold my sigma 70-300 APO because of the speed of focus when used at air shows and have brought the canon 70-200 f2.8 which has USM,i would recommend any canon lens that has usm over a tamron or sigma (unless it had hsm,the same as canon’s usm,well nearly)

the canon 100 – 300mm f4.5-5.6 usm is also worth looking at around £210-250

how old is your 350D? it may be worth checking what your firmware version is you can check here http://www.canon.co.jp/Imaging/eosdigital2/e3kr2_firmware-e.html

i know one of the updates was to do with auto power shut down failure if it was set to more than 2 min