Gentlemen,I am looking forward to a hardware upgrade for FSX. Question: would it be best to buy one super DX10 video card plus the Matrox option for three montiors or would it be better to back down a bit on video cards but go SLI to drive three monitors?

>Gentlemen,>>I am looking forward to a hardware upgrade for FSX. Question:>would it be best to buy one super DX10 video card plus the>Matrox option for three montiors or would it be better to back>down a bit on video cards but go SLI to drive three monitors?>>Based on the technical knowledge today, and answering specifically for FSX, Monster DX10 and TripleHead2Go. But that will be for the DX10 version of FSX, which has no release date or promise of early arrival, so what the result will be with a DX10 card running under DX9 no-one can say.Sorry we can't be more specific. Allcott

Thanks. The hardest part of the current situation is waiting. I really don't want to move until the DX10 cards are out.Is there any downside to the TripleHead2Go?

Mike, I don't know whether this will influence your decision making, but check out this post, quite possibly the most important post so far ins FSX history:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=361379&page=I was right to caution people about Vista/DX9 being a panacea. All those "I can't wait for Vista to finally get this thing humming" threads now look more than a little sad. That logic was always flawed. If more resources are consumed by the OS, then there are less available for applications. It's an immutable fact, which even MS acknowledge.When MS sends in the `Big Guns` to pave the way with comments like this, you know there is a problem that will not be solved by driver updates. My best estimate is 5-7% less performance reduction under Vista, all other things begin equal. And no early arrival for DX10 FSX either, it seems. They don't trust the hardware!So there are two ways to look at this now:1: Spend a lot on upgrading DX9 capable equipment and definitely hold off moving to Vista until well after the DX10 benefits are actually proven, and continue to use XP as the OS of choice or2: Accept that the move to Vista means not only paying for the OS, but also a marginal extra cost of increasing hardware just to get the SAME level of performance out of FSX in the short term, but with some guarantee of compatibility and the need to only upgrade the graphic card for DX10 later.It's still a complex choice, but to my way of thinking the halfway house of FSX/Vista/DX9 now makes not a jot of sense and reinforces my opinion that for simmers there is no need to think about moving to DX10 (and by implication, Vista) until well AFTER the DX10 patch has been applied, and it is proven to increase performance in line with the expenditure needed to accommodate it.Faced with those choices, and that we have no promises at all about what DX10 will do for FSX, nor what the actual hardware cost will be (as I said in another thread we have no guarantees that DX10 compatible cards, with their different architecture may actually run DX9 games SLOWER than current DX9 cards. We just don't know) the decision is easy for me. But you may think differently? Allcott

Everything is a mystery for now although it does seem pretty evident to me at least that MS is backpeddling on their promise of Vista being a gamer's OS and that it will run games much better than XP. This simply is not the case as every benchmark I have seen so far indicates the exact opposite (at least current games on DX9, DX10 may or may not change this). I won't be upgrading to Vista on my personal machine if my own tests confirm this as I have too many DX9 games that I will not accept frame rate loss in.SLI is a complete waste in FSX so save your money. Best case scenario would allow you to set one of the GPU's to do the AA and AF for you with no loss in frame rate but that's about the only advantage to SLI in FSX. As far as the triplehead is concerned; it is an amazing setup and it would add the greatest enjoyment to your simming imo. I could never go back to simming without it. It's just too cool to have a full 180 degree view out of your cockpit. It also greatly increases your awareness of your surroundings, especially on approach and in the pattern. It does have 3 drawbacks though that must be considered:1. It is very expensive.2. It requires a powerful PC as the resolution that games run under on this setup is 3840x1024. If your PC has trouble pumping out games at 1280x1024 then you can pretty much forget using this setup unless you plan to upgrade.3. It causes an annoying amount of ghosting and/or flickering on your monitors due to the splitting of the vga signal (or so I'm guessing). The flickering on my central LCD monitor is pretty bad.The positives far outweigh the negatives and it adds a whole new realm to flight simming. Couple it with a nice yoke and pedals, radio stack, and a TrackIR setup and you'd swear you were actually flying. ;)Dave

I appreciate your take on things. One has to factor the enjoyment to be realized between now and when the DX10 pieces come together. It is my perception that a good duo core cpu and motherboard with 2 Gigs on ram and a upper end graphics card will do pretty well with FSX.

Thanks, the triplehead seems like a good direction to go.