plus FS9 vs. FSXLike many of you i have spent the last 2 years trying to polish up my rig to get the best performance and visuals from FS9. I started with an Emachine with a Celeron D added a 6200OC 256mb card and 2 gigs of ram.This really allowed me to finally enjoy FS9, not top of the line, but it worked.Along comes FSX and like you I know it's time to upgrade, but the little E has finally hit a wall.Along comes Core 2 due...Resistance was futile, i had to get it. So, I found a nice HP m7680n at my local shop. I wanted the new rig to be a bit more flexible so i opted for the media center TV/PC version. 1200$I contemplated building, but this baby was sweet and had everything and more than what i wanted.So the new rig looks like this:E6400 Intel Core 2 Duo 2048 MB PC4200nVIDIA GeForce 7300LE2 250gig 7200rpm drives Raid1the old rig:Intel Celeron D 2.82048 MB of PC2700nVIDIA GeForce 6200OC1 80gig slow and bursting at the seams.so, like any good simmer i took a bunch of before and after pics of FS9 and FSX with the framerate counter on.here's a few, there's lots more at my Photobucket account.OLD RIG FS9 LOW SETTINGS:OLD RIG FS9 HIGH SETTINGS:OLD RIG FSX LOW SETTINGS:OLD RIG FSX ULTRA HIGH SETTINGS:NEW RIG FS9 LOW SETTINGS:(this was a bit of a surprise 100fps!)NEW RIG FS9 HIGH SETTINGS:NEW RIG FSX LOW SETTINGS:NEW RIG FSX HIGH SETTINGS:You can read all about the duo elsewhere, but let me just say that this thing is worth the price of admission. It's fast, REALLY fast and the load times have to be 50-70 percent faster.The new rig is Vista ready, that card will have to be replaced but I am REALLY excited to see what the FSX full version is like on this.it's all about the processor...jb

Wow...as they say, "A picture (or two or three) is worth a thousand words"Thanks,bt