Good evening all! Currently I am running The Asus A7N8X Deluxe Rev. 1.04 with bios 1008. My processor is the 2.1Ghz Athlon XP 2800, with 1 gig of Kingston PC2700 ram. My vidio card is the ATI 9700 Pro 128. I am runnning a 430 watt power supply in an Antec server case ,with plenty of cooling. I built this settup myself. Is it worth it to go to the Athlon 3200,and a good 256mb vidio card, keeping this MOBO, or should I fork over the mega cash for the new AMD ATHLON 64 4000+ 64-BIT SOCKET 939,and of course money for a new MOBO, RAM,etc?? I still think the Athlon processor is more bang for the buck over Intel,(if you have the cooling) Thanks in advance for any help!

Hi, Jim.The move to 3200 will not give you a sufficient performance increase to make it worth while. You could actually over clock the one you have and get to very close the same performance, this assumes your board will allow, and I think it does. Just keep an eye on the temp.I would go with the 64 bit, PCI express, I am partial to NVidia at this point, combination at some point in time. I think the system you have should be OK for the FS9. I used a similar system for my second sim and I get about 13000 counts on 3Dmark2001 with it. In FS9 I got around 20 FPS at LAX with Chris

Hi Jim,Will agree with all that TV wrote. I would add that if you decide on an AMD 64 CPU the Winchester core is the best choice with regard to bang for the buck. It is made using the 90nm process which yields more chips per wafer (lowering the cost) and runs cooler to boot. I believe the fastest Winchester available at this time is the +3500. And they overclock like bandits!Greg

Thanks for the replys! I guess It's time to start working some overtime!:-)

This is what I decided on:-)ASUS AX800PRO/TD256MB DDR3 RADEON X800PRO 8X AGP W/TV&DVI DUAL VGA,AMD ATHLON 64 4000+ (939 PIN) RETAILED 64-BIT BUNDLE.ASUS A8V DLX; CRUCIAL 1GB DDR400(512MB X 2) I am glad we have some B1900D's coming thru for heavy structural inspections, and Kevlar cockpit door installs,because I will need the overtime.:-eek

This is the result, I got the Athlon Fx-55 2.6 socket 939 chip,running 4 matched sticks of Corsair 3200XLPT DDR 512 each, for 2 gig total. I recived the wrong vidio card, so I still have the Radion 9700 128 Pro. Flying around KLGA with everything Maxed, FPS never went below 18, with no studders, even in the attached screen shot when in a turn for L/H downwind for rwy 4 LGA,with NYC skyline! So I guess with this much chip and ram, the vidio card doesnt matter! P.S. I have this coming in a week, Cirrus 2 with Beech yoke, http://www.flypfc.com/specials/specials.html Hows that for a good X-Mas present to myself?:( It comes with my choice of another throttle quadrant( got the 2 throttle lever jet)and a free beech clock.