Fellow Simmers, Hi I need some good advice from some guru's with some good knowledge on this stuff. I have an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Shuttle AN50R Motherboard with 1 gig of 400mhz ram still got a slot available thinking about throwing another gig in. And no I have the other than the 939 chipset(UGH). They got me at the store. (LOL). For Hard drive I am running an 80gb 10,000 rpm raptor. My Graphics are ok but I really think they could be alot better. For Graphics card I have a GeForce FX Nvidia 5500oc with the 256mb of ram. As for any idea's with my system what would be the next step to go toward's? Video & then grab the last stick of ram to throw in her. Guess after that not much I can really do. And I was wondering when FSX Comes out does anyone think my current system would be able to push everything ok with quite a few add-on's?Well I am really leaning to a new graphics card something I can just crank everything up to the max and not get the stutter molasses effect. Willing to pretty much go around the $500.00 dollar range for a video card. I prefer NVIDIA just do dunno why. I was looking at a 7900 model NVIDIA on NEWEGG. But been reading alot of problems with it such as pretty much crapping out on people in a day or 2.Could someone point me to a Nice Video card I can keep for awhile and not have to upgrade when FSX Comes out? Thanks, Josh

Hi,This will end up in the Hardware Forum!I would save your money and wait until FSX and DX10 are out in 2007. Then see what is out there. I think that anything you do now will turn to disappointment when that happens.Don't even add the extra memory. There is very little gained, if anything, going from 1 to 2 gig.Hope this helps,Jimhttp://www.hifisim.com/Active Sky V6 Development Team Active Sky V6 Proud SupporterHiFi Beta TeamRadar Contact Supporter: http://www.jdtllc.com/AirSource Member: http://www.air-source.us/FSEconomy Member:http://dot.kelder.net:8080/fseconomy/

I would go with any Geforce 78xx or 79xx, or the cheaper 7600GT. Even with the 7600GT (which I have) you'll see a nice performance increase in FS9. I just could not justify a more expensive GPU for maybe a few more FPS. Even with the 7600GT, I can play Oblivion at the highest settings with no problems at all.G'luck

Howdy, Thanks Gents. I will take that advice to heart there. I really appreciate it. I guess for the time being I am gonna upgrade my video card. This GeForce 5500 is a bit behind the corner and the curiousity is really getting me on wondering how much better my graphics or anti-aliasing can get on this booger... I may try out one of them 7900 Geforce models I guess... Oh does AGP have SLI capabilities or is that only for PCI Graphics cards? Thanks Again, Josh

The highest you can go with AGP is the 7800GS. As far as I know, there are no AGP cards for the 79xx chipsets. I also haven't seen any SLI support for AGP.You might want to upgrade your mainboard to support PCIe cards (Biostar, MSI, DFI). I assume you have the 754 socket, which is still perfectly fine. The only difference of Socket 939 is the DualDDR support - the increase of performance is marginal. Also, save your money: 1GB of RAM is plenty nowadays. Your major bottleneck is right now the GPU. Your CPU is also good - the 3200+ is still a very good performer.In a few months you can still upgrade to a 4000+ Dual Core with 939 or AM2. By then, I would also expect that the price could come down into the $250 range.Good luck.