Whilst you may be happy with what you are getting, FS9 was nowhere near as disappointing performance wise on a top end system of the day. Your results (and mine with the FSX beta) must depress the living daylights out of those considering upgrading to the latest and greatest. I remember when FS9 came out, it performed better than FS2002 at equivalent graphics settings. The biggest issue for me at the time was the lack of addons for the new version and it took nearly a full year before a descent set (aircraft, scenery, weather, flight planner, etc) was available. FSx has more addons available on or just after release, but the performance issue is steering me well away from even starting to migrate to this new version.Gary

When I purchased the new system, I knew going in that I would not end up with frames off the chart in FSX. I wanted a top end system that would run FS9 amazing and FSX great. If I can land at a fairly busy airport in VC mode by hand with no real stutters, I

Gary, I have a VERY midrange system by today's standards, yet I'm thoroughly satisfied with FSX. A few key points: - this may sound illogical, but the FPS in FS9 do not translate well to the FPS in FSX. For whatever reason, FSX gives smoother, stutter-free performance at frame rates that would be unacceptably low in FS9. (Some of the ACES Team have blogged about this, saying it has something to do with the new Shader support.) If you can turn off your frame rate counter, and just enjoy the incredible view out the window, you may be happy with FSX. - you need to choose your sliders carefully, and match them to the type of flying you like best (i.e. low and slow, vs. jets). In my opinion, maxing out some of the sliders provides relatively small benefit in return for a large performance penalty. If you can live without autogen, it will significantly improve performance. Personally, I don't miss it at all because of the type of flying I do -- mainly jets. - FSX doesn't accurately detect a multi-core CPU. As kittie has pointed out, you will need to set it up manually to take advantage of multiple cores. FSX does support hyperthreading, but only partly so. My embarrassingly outdated system: AthlonXP 3200+ 1 GB RAM Sapphire Radeon 9600XT (overclocked) 256MB Maxtor 250GB SATA hard drive Hercules Game Theater XP audio card I hope this is at least somewhat helpful.

All good points, but my main gripe with FSX is that when I set it to look visually similar to FS9 on max sliders, I get anywhere from quarter to half the performance of FS9. No matter how you dress it, this is comparitively BAD, especially as the starting point for the version that is supposed to last us over the next few years. FS2004 over FS2002 did not exhibit such a backward trend in comparative performance.Regarding future hardware coming in to save the day, I have stated before that FSX, like all other versions before it, is primarily CPU bound and the future for CPUs is multi=core, not huge core speed boosts that we have seen in the past. Multi-core seems only marginally supported by FSX, so unless a patch comes out rectifying this, you'll likely keep your sliders mid-low until the next version is upon us. Gary

I just built my new system. Go SLI man, it pays. My dual 7900GTX's run in full 16x16SLi (I have the mobo one up from yours) each has a 675MHz core clock and 1800MHz on the RAM. Mind you ou have a faster processor, but video speed will make much more of a difference than higher CPU speed. Is your RAM the low Latency type? I got some Kingston HyperX low latency that's meant for the nForce 590 chipset on our boards. Dual channel DDR2 800MHz on it.I have EVERYTHING max'd out, and get about 20-75 FPS depending on altitude, etc.

oops! Just re-read your original post. You have the 7950 card, dual GPU. So you can't run SLi as that mobo doesn't support Quad SLi... You would gain alot of performance swapping out that card for 2 7900's in SLI as you'd have 16x16 pipelines to work with instead of just 16 with the one card...

Hi Nick,We just wanted to go for the "Wow" factor when we built this. We had a motto. "Go Big, or Go Home". A 1 Gig video card just sounds so cool, and it's even nicer now because Nvidia has stopped making that card. (The 7950 now consists of either 2x256 cards, or 2x128 cards).We will be swapping out this video card as soon as a really nice DX10 native card hits the market anyways. This machine will last us for the duration of FSX, and when they announce a new version of flightsim, we will have to go back to the computer shop and have them build us one for that sim. (It has gotten to the point where we are on a first name basis with them).Blue skies!

Hmmmmm... DX-10 specific cards? My cards are DX10 ready...

Nick,I don't know where you are getting your information but MS has previously admitted on these forums that FSX was not coded to take any advantage of SLI, and many users here have reported no gain from their own experiences. If you want to check for yourself, disable one of your graphics cards and run FSX to see roughly the same performance.Also, CPU is much more influential with FSX performance than the GPU, or even fast memory for that fact. Again, if you wish to prove this to your self, try overclocking your CPU and GPU individually to see what has the greatest impact. If you don't like the idea of overclocking, underclocking works just as well to prove this point. What you will see is that FSX performance scales almost direcly proportional with CPU speed whereas GPU speed will have some, but mostly marginal impact.Gary

>Hmmmmm... DX-10 specific cards? My cards are DX10 ready...Not possible......Only card (just launched) that is DX10 compliant is the 8800GTX

Hi Your system specs are similar to mine, which are:athlonxp 3400+1Gb Ram9600xt 128meg cardAudigy 2 Sound cardWhat sort of fps / settings do you run in FSX? I have very low AI, 1280x1024x32, AA off, anisotropic filtering off, no road vehicle, autogen tree fix and autogen sparse. Scenery objects 1 position down from the maximum, terrain detail / resolution and texture resolution all maxxed. I get about 10 fps in cities and more like 20 in the rural setting (I`ve locked mine to 21fps).Cheers James

I'm not sure what you mean by "you can't run SLi as that mobo doesn't support Quad SLi" I'm reading the box now and it says 4 SLi 16. If I'm reading it right, Duel PCI-Ex16. That's 2 7950's, that's 4 GPU's is it not?Kittie

Your running in SLI with the 7950GX2...You could run Quad SLI on that mb if you wanted...Quad SLI is a driver issue..Congrats on the new System!! Nize!!

You can run Quad SLi, however you will have 2 GPU's each sharing 16 pipelines (each GPU only gets 8) where as with 2 GPU's total each would get 16 to itself. That is a bottleneck, and so far the technology isn't there for 32x32 quad SLi. But when it does become available, it will be the ultimate setup! :D

No, I'm pretty sure that it does not share the pipeline, that's why I got it. It's straight 16 each. Unless that's just for running 2 PCIE cards and I'm confusing that.:-roll