Hello all,Well I've made the jump to AMD 64 and just purchased a AMD64 3000+ Newcastle processor, and i already have 1 gig of Kingston DDR 400 ram. im upgrading from a AMD 2000+ XP processor so this is a pretty big jump. My question is..will this be sufficient for good smoothness with eye candy in flight sim 2004? also with Ultimate traffic and say the PMDG 737? My current setup:AMD 2000+ XP160 gb seagate hdNvidia 5900FX video card1 gig kingston ddr 400 also, what kind of system do you think will be needed when this new flight sim comes out? im wanting this upgrade to last me a while.Thx for your help,Stephen

what!?!?!?you werent getting smoothness in your previous setup?

Not when I had all the goodies on.. PMDG 737 UT Traffic at 100% dense scenery, dense autogen. my little guy just couldnt handle all of it..and the UT really makes a diff for me when im flying.. with your setup..do you get smoothness even when comin into land at a busy airport?? it seems ive had memory leaks as well..i think the system is a bit outdated for me.

Well UT make a major toll especially in busy airports so don

well with my system its really really horrible, i cannot fly PMDG 737 800 in VC thats why i have upgraded my pc and placed my order for a new one, see thread "My New PC Purchase".

>Well UT make a major toll especially in busy airports so>don

I don

Well with my system setup I can get relative smoothness, still a few pauses here and there, switching views and moving my eyepoint in the VC will take a second for textures to load... but that's what I get when I fly around heavily populated areas with 100% traffic and all display settings maxed. Anyway it takes an expensive system to get the most out of FS. You will see an improvement but don't expect perfection.

>Well with my system setup I can get relative smoothness,>still a few pauses here and there, switching views and moving>my eyepoint in the VC will take a second for textures to>load... but that's what I get when I fly around heavily>populated areas with 100% traffic and all display settings>maxed. Anyway it takes an expensive system to get the most out>of FS. You will see an improvement but don't expect>perfection.should i expect to be satisfied for a while?? like able to fly into say LGA with good amount of scenery and say 75% traffic and good frames?

IN MY OPINION :-lolI have the AMD 64 3200+ w/ 1GB RAM and SATA hard drive with the X700 PCI Express card.Using PMDG, Active Sky, UT at 100%, I can safely say that I get a good 25 FPS in all instances. I run at 1280x1024 with 2x AA and all sliders maxed execpt for ground shadows.Occasionally, with heavy clouds, this may dip down a little, but it is nothing that bothers me.I am happy.

>IN MY OPINION :-lol>>I have the AMD 64 3200+ w/ 1GB RAM and SATA hard drive with>the X700 PCI Express card.>>Using PMDG, Active Sky, UT at 100%, I can safely say that I>get a good 25 FPS in all instances. I run at 1280x1024 with>2x AA and all sliders maxed execpt for ground shadows.>>Occasionally, with heavy clouds, this may dip down a little,>but it is nothing that bothers me.>>I am happy.have you done any other tweaks to your system..b/c the person who responded before you has an even faster pc but not the same frame rates...hmm but i think i can OC up to what the 3200 is clocked at so your report makes me happy. is that video card faster than my 5900fx? just wonderin...in regards to video cards..what should i update to? they're comin out with new ones so often i cant keep up

The only other thing I can think of is I use FSW Skyworld to get the better clouds, oh and I use FSAutoStart ;-)

>IN MY OPINION :-lol>>I have the AMD 64 3200+ w/ 1GB RAM and SATA hard drive with>the X700 PCI Express card.>If you would replace the hard drive with an ordinary IDE drive and the graphics card with Radeon 9800Pro 128M, how much difference could that make?

I'm not sure....my old gaming rig (which is now my Media Center computer) was an Intel Pentium 3.0 HT with 512 MB RAM, IDE drive and Radeon 9800Pro 128MB. I could not acheive the same FPS with the same settings...I had to knock down my resolution, autogen, and other factors to get something acceptable (to me)...how much of that was CPU or hard drive or memory or video, I really can't tell. MOre than likely a combination of factors.

I push FS to the limit. 6x AA, 16x AF, 1600x1200 res, 100% traffic mainly flying into big airports such as KLAX, KJFK, KMIA, etc. Flight1 Environment, FSGenesis meshes and landclass, ALL sliders maxed. So there is the reason why I get average framerates. Sure I could lower something and get better frames, but as of now my machine runs FS very smoothly and I am happy even if the frame count isn't as high. This isn't a pissing contest. Frames mean nothing, all that matters is smooth viewing with no stutters.