I'm looking at getting a new graphics card for my system mostly for FSX but also for new games such as Crysis which is coming out in a few months.My current system is:MSI K8N SLIAMD Athlon 64 35002.5Gb Corsair RAMWindows Vista Ultimate EditionI was looking at the XFX GEFORCE 8800GTS 640MB XXX but was wondering would I need to upgrade the rest of my system to take full advantage of it? My alternatives are to upgrade now or to wait a few months till the price of the graphics card has come down a little and get another one so that I can use them in SLI configuration.Would FSX take advantage of this? I'm not sure how FSX works with SLI. I look forward to hearing from you.Many thanks!

Are you sure your current motherboard will support DirectX 10?

>Are you sure your current motherboard will support DirectX>10?What does a motherboard have to do with DX10?RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

>What does a motherboard have to do with DX10?Thats' why I asked, just curious?

What does a motherboard have to do with DX10?Absolutely nothing.GTS8800 is very good value for money, excellent card and DX10 capable. Ofcourse, DX9 will run just fine, excellent benchmarks.rgds,Ben

Going back to my original question will my current CPU and memory limit / restrict the performance of the 8800 GTS graphics card?In particular in FSX I mean.

In FSX, your bottleneck will be your CPU. This is probably the case even for 7xxx series cards. FSX is very CPU intensive, especially if you turn up Autogen.So for FSX, you will get some improvement from an 8800...you'll be able to max the water effects, and other shader effects. You'll also be able to crank the AA and AF. And you can jack up the resolution.I'm going out on a limb here, but Crysis will probably be a bit more balanced vis-a-vis CPU/GPU use. So you will probably get more improvement with a game like Crysis with an 8800.In general though, with your CPU and memory, an 8800 card is not overkill. 8800 SLI might be.

Do you think I should upgrade my motherboard, CPU and memory now?I really have no idea what to do. I have mostly FSX in mind and everything else is secondary. People have said wait a bit but I'm not sure what I'm waiting for exactly.

What is your current graphics card?

A pathetic Geforce FX 5500 128 Mb PCI. The fact that its a PCI card is causing other problems unrelated to FSX.

>A pathetic Geforce FX 5500 128 Mb PCI. The fact that its a>PCI card is causing other problems unrelated to FSX.Since you have a 5 series card...In my opin you would be well served to upgrade the video card.How much you want to spend, is up to you. And, whether or not you want to jump all the way to a DX10 card at this time, is also up to you.As was said, if you upgrade, you will be limited by your cpu, even with a 7-series card.I have found that with my 3700+ and 7800GT combo, I can run 2.x water with little or no frame rate hit vs 1.x water. I can run ground scenery shadows with little or no frame hit. I can run 16x AA at 1024x768 with little or no frame hit. This tells me that my card is handling things, and so my cpu is the limitation.In short, no matter the graphic effects I turn on, the 7800GT can handle them. On the other hand the cpu has a direct bearing on the frames I get.The 5-series cards have known shader issues with FSX, and besides, you could spend $80 and get a much better card than what you have right now. Right now your vid card is your limitation, but once you get a 6800 or 7-series or 8-series, your cpu will be your limiting factor.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

Yuck.OK, you have two options.Option 1 (stay with current hardware)You have plenty of memory, and your CPU is moderately fast. You have a socket 939 motherboard, so you can't get much from a CPU upgrade. If you know how to overclock, you might be able to get your CPU up to 2.4 or 2.5 ghz (it is 2.2 ghz stock). You could get the 8800 card for this system and you'd have great water, special effects, AA, AF, and resolution in FSX. You would be a little challenged on Autogen and AI traffic (these are more CPU intensive). If you kept the Autogen and AI traffic settings toned down, you'd be OK (unless you demand 30+ FPS). This depends on whether you like Autogen or AI traffic. Later on in Q3 of this year, you could upgrade your motherboard to a socket AM2+ board, and get an Agena or Kuma CPU (AMD's quad and dual core K10 chips). These CPUs will fly. You would need to get new memory (DDR2), too. You could keep your 8800 GPU.Option 2 (get new hardware now)If you want maximum performance in FSX now, sell your computer and get a Core 2 Duo system, 2 to 4 gigs of RAM, and your 8800 GPU. If you know you want an 8800 GPU, then get it and try it with your current computer. If you feel you need more CPU, then upgrade and take the 8800 along for the ride.

Thanks for the advice.I'm going to hang on to the hardware I've got at present. I'll get a new socket AM2+ motherboard and one of the quad core processors in due course. I'm guessing it would be around August time? I should be able to get a second identical 8800 graphics card much cheaper around then as well for use in SLI mode for other games etc.Thanks for all the help!

Might be late third quarter. The Agena is coming out before Kuma, so if you want quad core, then yeah, maybe August.

You also asked about SLi. FSX is not programmed to take advantage of either Crossfire or SLi, because those are incompatible with certain types of multi-monitor technology. A recent hardocp.com review showed that SLi could slightly improve FSX's antialiasing, but SLi didn't improve frame rates at all. I wouldn't recommend purchasing a SLi configuration unless you have some other game (like Crysis) that is actually programmed to take advantage of SLi. Regarding the upcoming CPUs, I feel this is where you'll get the greatest performance benefit for FSX. In addition to the new AMD processors that have already been mentioned, Intel is coming out with a new line of 45 nm chips (codenamed "Penwyn") that are expected to offer significantly higher clock speeds. They're supposed to hit the market in the second half of this year. Here is what I would do if I were you: see if you can find a deal on a better PCI-e graphics card (even something used), because the rest of your system components should actually give you decent performance with FSX, albeit not with sliders at maximum. (No PC today can run FSX with maximum sliders anyway.) Then, I'd wait to see what happens with the new CPU releases later this year, and consider a major system upgrade at that time.