New PC advice

[Guest rmorrison1]

Hi, I would like to buy a new PC and I'd like some advice on which type of system would best suit my simulator needs. Currently I'm running a P4 2.8GHZ, 1GB Ram, ATI Radeon 9600. I run FS2004 with a lot of addons and basically it is impossible to play. Please advise me on the best motherboard, CPU and Graphics card to enjoy my simulator hobby. I am not rich and would prefer to keep the whole thing up to $1000. Any advise will be greatly appreciated,ThanksRob.

[Guest hmslion]

You can build a great fs9 machine for that. The AMD Dual Cores are a very good value compared with the premium being charged for the Intel chips. The dual core frankly does little for either FS9 or FS10 - neither are in any way optimized or written to use both cores to significantly increase performance - but will help you in other games like Oblivion, if you play it. I would shoot for the first level of card below the very top of the line video cards. You pay a lot for the last 10% of performance. I have a 7900 GS card - about $200.Go for 1 to 2 gigs of system memory - Corsair value label is a good cost-effective choice. I am partial to ASUS motherboards. You should be able to bring all of this home for about $1000 - it will be great for FS9, not so much for FS10. I'm not sure there is a machine out there right now that can run FSX well - I think MS missed the boat by not writing for dual cores more agressively. It will be interesting to see if when Vista comes out, SLI will help the sim. ColinPortland Oregon.

[Guest capncrazy68]

I too am planing an upgrade to my machine, but for FSX. It runs FS9 pretty good. But FSX I have to have alot of sliders down. CPU and GPU is on my list. My question is should I upgrade anything now, or wait for Vista and DX10 card? I've been reading that Dual Core is not supported? I don't really get into other games much, but I can't say never. If I go dual core, will there be a downside? I think next version will support them, so why not go dual now? As for graphics, if I want DX10 and Vista, I'll be waiting. Or I could just sell this rig, and start over. What's your thoughts on this? Don't mean to highjack this post.Jim

[Guest Scratch1964]

Jim,I thought about selling or scrapping my old desktop running an Athlon 2200XP and GF4Ti 4200. I have now placed an order for an Intel Conroe E6700 based set up, but instead of scrapping the old system I have decided to gradually build a new second set up. The Hard drive and SB Audigy sound card are still fine as is the 15" TFT monitor. It's only the PSu, CPU, GPU, motherboard, & RAM that I need to replace and will do it gradually, or prehaps even put the Radeon x1950Pro card from the Conroe systsm into the 2nd PC in order to upgrade to a Radeon R600 as and when.Certainly, I would wait a while longer for Vista and DX10. They will both require a settling in period before I pounce for either. A good DX9 card will well and truly surfice for now.As for going dual core, well we are not far away from quad core now either. More cores are certainly the way home computing is heading. For me I use the PC for a lot of other tasks besides flying so it is well worth my while having a Core 2 Duo CPU. Do you plan to upgrade your set up only for flying, or, like myself do you have other tasks in mind?Scratch1964