I just purchased MSFS 2004 a couple of weeks ago and am happy with the improvements over 2002, but am not enjoying it much because my current computer isn't fast enough. So, I am looking to buy a computer to fill my needs. My goal is to max out all the sliders and still have a decent frame rate of at least 20. Is that possible, or is it wishfull thinking? I am open to all ideas and makes of computers. Obviously, I would like to spend as little as possible. With these things in mind, what computer should I buy and what can I expect.Your help is greatly appreciated.Costas

First of all, what type of system are you currently using? Second, why do all the sliders have to be maxed? Careful adjustment of some of the sliders will give you the visual richness that FS2004 offers, while perhaps allowing you to keep your current system a bit longer. Take note of my system specs--I've been running FS2004 since beta and easily average in the 20's even with a bit of AI and Autogen...

Ok, here it is. I have the following.Pentium 4 with 1.7Ghz 640 MB RAMNvidia GeForce2 MX/400Windows XPCould you tell me where your sliders are positioned?As far as maxing the sliders, I don't necessarily care about airplane reflections and shadows, but I do care about having detailed scenery and 3D clouds. I like my cities to be busy, if you know what I mean and I don't think I can do this with my current system, unless I'm missing something.Thanks for your help,CostasP.S. Do you think that an updated graphics card would do the trick, and if so what do you recommend?

An updated graphics card will help, but you need both. I'm the same as you- high density scenery and autogen, 3D clouds. Word of caution- a CRAY mainframe would probably choke if the weather was set to severe with a far draw distance- It's not possible to get extremely smooth framerates in that case. That said-Go for a 3.0 or 3.2 gHz CPU, with 800 FSB. 1 gig of Ram. Radeon 9800 with 256 megs.The single biggest framerate killer is weather, with AI being second. If you don't use add-on AI aircraft, and more parking, and many add-on airports you will have high framerates.I have a 3.0 with radeon 9800 128, and even with the PMDG 737 I get 20+ at all the default airports with the scenery on "extremely dense"- however it drops to 15 or less with weather. At a Simflyers airport, with Project AI aircraft and AFCAD 2 (30 planes), with some weather, in the PMDG it drops to 8 or so. 8 is the lowest I've seen with everything on. Not exactly fluid- but good enough for taxiing. In these cases, I always hope I get assigned a runway that turns me AWAY from the airport :)In the sky at 20 or 30 thousand feet, I am back to 25 or so.Unfortunately there is no current rig that you can have all the sliders maxed and have 20+ in all situations. The FS world varies almost as much as the real world, and the framerates can flucuate singnificantly.Hope this helps.

Your cpu speed is double mine... Your graphics card is poor, however, but if you could locate a clearance 4200/TI like mine (especially one with 128 or more meg), you'd be in good shape there.Quick rundown on how I've upped my performance:~I run at 800x600x32 (saves several fps)~I run shadows off, water reflections off~I've applied the "default.xml" fix to remove the Autogen extras like fast food places. That was the single biggest improvement to sim performance, even with Autogen off. With Autogen maxed, a typical city like Reno, NV nets about 20-22 fps on my slower system~I replaced my default 737, 747, 777, Dash-8 and MD-80 with AI models (while leaving the panels as they were). This really improved AI performance, so that Reno could yield 15-20 fps with default AI maxed.~I fly away from the super detailed airports, such as LAX. There's maybe twenty of them out of the tens of thousands in the FS2004 world, but their performance fps wise 2/3rds of what I get elsewhere~My clouds are set for 100 pct. 3-d, draw distance 30 miles, density maxed. I do not use dynamic weather or real weather. I've added Chris Willis's improved fps clouds. The biggest problem with cloud performance is in the layers--the more layers, the worse performance. So I'd rather sacrifice real weather and control how dense my cloud environment is. Lower the vis to 30 miles, and you get a beautiful world to fly in.~Everything else is maxed--mesh, texture size, etc...Look at these pics from my system. I was getting over 30 fps in these shots:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=147160&page=

I forgot to mention- If you can't afford a whole new rig, I have a GeForce 4600 Ti sitting dormant. I was going to put it on EBAY but after going through the hassle of shipping a bike and snowboard in the SAME DAY, I'm a little put off. It's a PNY- works great in my rig (see below)- upgraded to a Radeon 9800. Send me a message if you're interested. That goes for anyone else, but since he could really use the help, I'm selling it to Costas first if he wants it. $25 plus shipping (FedEx probably $10 or so).*Note there is a known issue with the PNY cards- they were manufactured so the circuit boards are thinner than other cards. Some people (a friend of mine had this problem) had the cards make their machines reboot, and sometimes not boot, and have screen corruption. The best fix is to, believe it or not, put a shim from the edge of the card to the bottom or top of the case, and bend the card slightly sideways- this makes the contacts have more force, and seems to fix the problem, if you don't mind rigging your rig :)Also, I would recommend an Intel board, with a P4- last thing you want is compatibility problems. Check the Intel site for tested memory, and buy memory that was tested- don't skimp here- you may end up with headaches, and a bunch of useless, non-returnable hardware.

I run a nearly 3-year old DELL P4, 2.53 Ghz, RDRAM 1024, Ti-4600, nVidia 56.** drivers, and large dual monitors. FS2004 has always worked well on it, with all kinds of utilities in the background. However, since I did the FS-GS tweaking last month, and changed to a more fps friendly antivirus (in my case, Panda Platinum), and activated FSAutostart (an amazing utility that helps PC performance hugely), it really runs fabulously. So my message to you would be: get a medium hi-end P4, but don't spend a fortune (i.e., over $2,000) 'cos if you do a major PC tweak like I did, fluidity and imaging will soar and will make a very big difference to the performance of the sim overall.Of course, if you do have $4,000 lying around, I s'poze I'd prolly be tempted by Alienware's rig (!)JS

If you'd replace that gawd-awful graphics card with something useful you'd possibly not have to do very much else. That card is about the same as installing a one inch water pipe to the back yard and then putting a nozzle on it which will allow only 1/4 of the water out. The ram on the machine isn't much more than you need to run WinXP. It's a memory hog in itself. If the board will support it then I'd boost it up to a gig.If you do those two things then you might be able to save having to buy a whole new system for maybe a year. By then the new bus machines will (hopefully) be out and that's gonna be the time to buy.:D

I have a similar Q.My system is:AMD XP 2500+ (clocked to 2.2GHz with 400MHz FSB)XP 3200+ quiet cooler and 4 case fans 2 in, 2 out.1 Gig 400Mhz DDRGeForce 4 MX440 128 DDR.I run at 1280x1024 so I can read the guages in complex add on aircraft like Altitude/Knok Media - Concorde or PMDG 737NG. I fly mostly IFR and spend a lot of my time with just blue sky out the window.Frame rates are usually between 8 and 20, except when there is a lot of clouds and weather, especially at sunset/dawn.I want to fork out and upgrade my GFX card, probably on EBay, bt I am unsure what to get. An ATI 9800 was recomended to me, but there is confusion about the version. I can get an ATI 9800 256Mb DDR for about 70 UK pounds brand new, but someone said I would be better off buying a 9600Pro 128 as the GPU has twice the channels and the standard 9800 is only dual channel, not quad channel and I might not see much improvement over the MX440.What are you guy's thoughts?PS. Intel clock frequencies are effective not absolute. A 2.2GHz Intel will probably only be clocked at 1.2Ghz. AMD's counter this by specifying their CPUs to match Intel's fake clock rates, the 2500 is meant to equal the P4 2.5Ghz and runs natively at 1.4Ghz. I have actually clocked mine up to 2.2Ghz real clock freq, so it's equivalent to an Intel P4 4Ghz, plus it makes a nice heater for my room in winter.

Thanks to all for your ideas. I'm still torn whether to just upgrade my graphics card and see how that goes, or I might bite the bullet and get a new pc.I do have a few questions though.JohnCi, where can I download the "Default-XML" fix? Nice pictures by the way.ChristianHolmes, thanks for the graphics card offer. That sounds like a good deal. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do, so if you need to sell it, by all means do it. Dekoven, just curious what is a "Bus Machine". You'll have to forgive me, but I've been out of the computer market for a couple of years and have a lot of catching up to do. While you're at it, maybe you can also tell me what "FSB" stands for on the newer computer processors.Thanks again for everyone's help.Costas

>JohnCi, where can I download the "Default-XML" fix? Nice pictures by the way.Actually, it's a fix which greatly improves autogen performance (at the expense of some detail). Look for a file named "default.xml" in your MSFS folders, and rename it (in case you ever want to restore it) to default.bak.It was discovered that some of the advanced autogen objects stayed "stuck" in memory, which caused performance to degrade over time. What's odd is I noticed even with Autogen off, long tern performance of FS2004 improved on my rig after I renamed this file.There's other pieces to this "fix". Search these forums for "default.xml" and you'll find lots of information...RegardsJohn

Don't buy anything..until you read this.http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=main/review/alien.htm

I recently upgraded using a new Motherboard, CPU, and CPU fan. This was the first swap-out of a motherboard for me. It was easy to do and the Bios/XP improvements make it a no-brainer. I jumped to an AMD 3000+, from 1800+. I used the same video card, memory, and everything else. The cost was right at $200 from TigerDirect.The results were dramatic. Now I run from choppy (before), to quite smooth with most everything maxed out. I run 2 monitors, Ultimate Traffic at max, and FS Navigator at all times. Frame rates vary from about 10 to 25, but the main thing is I'm always smooth and can make nice landings.I did this because of the dramatic changes coming about right now. The 2 new video cards (NVidia 6800 & AMD X800), just released, double the video power of before. And AMD has is out with a 64 bit 3800+, even though I've not seen any yet. Then there's the move to PCI Express just around the corner (this month or next), and 940 pin mother boards.The upgrade is a cheap "stop-gap" until all those new major improvements sort out. It is clear, that if your into the high-end systems, this is the end of a product cycle that has been somewhat stagnant for about 18 months.Bob .... (Lecanto, Fl)

Alright guys. I can't afford a $4,000+ rig from Alienware, but I am thinking of purchasing this DELL. I want to stay right around $1,000. Here are some details:Pentium

One thing you may want to think about...Prepackaged systems such as those from Dell or HP often use proprietary parts--MB's, sometimes memory, etc.... If you've ever installed an add-on card before, you have all the skills needed to build your own system. Building your own system, you can position yourself to more easily upgrade in the future.My own system started as a P3/450, with a 20 gig HD, 64 megs of Ram, a Voodoo card, etc.... For less than $400, I upgraded it to an 80 gig drive, 800MHZ cpu, 4200TI, and 384megs ram.All those changes would have been impossible with a packaged system--I would have hit proprietary roadblocks right and left.Add to that another issue--with a packaged system, a lot of "junk" is loaded behind the scenes that can really bog your system down. You can literally spend months wading through the needless utilities and applets prepackaged with the system trying to isolate the stutters they cause.There's a lot of good things about buying prepackaged systems. If you're not a tinkerer, or worry about dropping the Phillips in the case :), then building it yourself isn't for you. But if performance AND budget are important, consider building one yourself. Your short term costs could be a bit higher, but your long term costs are certainly less. You may also be able to leverage certain pieces of your current system--your hard drive, modem or NIC, even your sound card.I wouldn't think any less of you for going with a prepackaged system, but I wanted you to consider the benefits of building your own. As far as reliability, my system with its Iwill MB and Antec Case/Power supply has outlived most of the Dells in my office--it will be turning six in a few months. That's pretty good given the daily t-storms and power surges we deal with in the summertime here in the desert SW...-John