Hi!I wonder if anyone has experience of P 4 2.53 gHz for FS 2002.What about performance, framerates, etc.?As of now I have an AMD Athlon 2000XP, which is OK but not toostrong with performance.And, Gigabyte mainboards; are they any good?I hear that they are.Grateful for tips...Thanks Hans HermanssonSWEDEN

Just put together a 2.53/512mb Cosair 3200 memory system using the ASUS P4PE motherboard. Outstanding performance, FS2002 now smooth as glass. Noticeable performance over my older machine, an AMD XP2100+/512mb 2100 memory on the MSI K7T266 Pro2 motherboard. I don't believe you can go wrong with the P4 2.53 processor. I have played with overclocking and the system runs fine at 2.85gHz altho I flight sim at 2.66. The sim is completely smooth at 2.53 and the higher 2.85GHz while showing impressive framerates and benchmark scores also brings higher cpu temperatures.I would recommend the ASUS motherboard and faster Cosair memory.

What settings do you use. Can you get a smooth performance with most settings maxed at airports like LAX and ATL? Or, what kind of framerates do you get?

With all settings maxed and all items checked on, Autogen, Justin's 75 meter terrain mesh and RealScene 38 meter high resolution scenery the sim gets 18-20 fps at Atlanta and drops to 13-15 fps at LAX. This was using the Cessna 421C Golden Eagle airplane. The sim is still smooth and the scenery is something to see. Again the machine is slightly overclocked to 2.66gHz, the video card is a MSI G4 Ti-4400 with the resolution at 1280x1024x32.

I have been using my P4 2.53 Ghz PC for about a month now and have been very happy with the performance. My specs:Gigabyte GA-8IHXP Motherboard512 MB RDRAM 1066Abit GF4TI4600 w/128 MB(2) Western Digital 80 GB, 7200 rpm hard drives w/8 MB cacheCreative Lab Audigy sound cardLite-on DVD 16x CDLite-on LTR48 CD Read-WriteLian-Li aluminum case w/350 watt power supply, 3 fansWin XP Home w/sp1ViewSonic G90f 19 in MonitorWith everything maxed except AI traffic (50%), I can average close to 30 fps, even at Chicago O'Hare. Everything runs smoothly, but I can induce a slight hesitation in steep turns over Chicago. I have been very pleased that the system has been extremely stable and have no system crashes, despite a lot of experimenting with video drivers (now using 40.72).If I built another system today, I would look at the AMD 2600 - I think it would give comparable performance and would use less costly DDR memory. The Radeon 9700 would give more video performance, but is still too expensive, IMHO.Dale