Well, my wife is making me choose only one of these for Christmas. I have a dell c521 with 2x512 ram and built in graphics. My options are 2x1gigs of ram or a nvida 70xx something video card. Which will help FSX perform best on my pc?

Thats a tough one. IMO, I would probably spring for the video card, as long as it has 512MB of memory.

>Well, my wife is making me choose only one of these for>Christmas. I have a dell c521 with 2x512 ram and built in>graphics. My options are 2x1gigs of ram or a nvida 70xx>something video card. Which will help FSX perform best on my>pc?http://i.dell.com/images/global/products/e.../dimen_c521.jpgRob,I think the C521 is a 'narrow' case model. So I think the choice is already made...a standard video card will not fit so it'll have to be the RAM. Measure the height of the backplate slots and let us know. They may use different case sizes in different countries.Is this your PC?http://hometown.aol.co.uk/JimCooper1/c521.JPGRegardsJim

Yikes...good point Jim. Those machines look extremely limiting.

Yeah, it is limiting. However, i am able to find "low profile" or "half height" cards. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....tk=&srchInDesc=Now, can anyone tell me why I can get a 512Mb for $30 and a 256 for $80?

Yeah, it is limiting. However, i am able to find "low profile" or "half height" cards. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....tk=&srchInDesc=Now, can anyone tell me why I can get a 512Mb for $30 and a 256Mb for $80?

>Well, my wife is making me choose only one of these for>Christmas. I have a dell c521 with 2x512 ram and built in>graphics. My options are 2x1gigs of ram or a nvida 70xx>something video card. Which will help FSX perform best on my>pc?My impressions after trying out FSX was that I won't consider even having it installed with less than 2 Gb RAM. I found my 1 Gb RAM incurring much stutter due to harddrive access the most glaring issue.

512MB vs 256MB is like saying this car has a 60 gallon fuel tank and this car has a 30 gallon fuel tank. What is more important is the GPU. A sports car may have a much smaller fuel tank than a saloon car but it will be a lot faster engine. 512MB is only really necessary if you're running multiple monitors and need to store lots of pixels. Obviously the bigger the graphics memory the better your frame rates can be..but as FS is pretty smooth at 25fps you don't need to buffer too many frames so large capacity is not that important.Also that list of graphics cards will not improve FSX as much as making sure your RAM is up to 2GBRegardsJim