Hewlett Packard Pavilion Elite M9540FProcessor Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300Processor Speed 2.5 GhzRAM 8GBHard Drive 750GBOptical Drive SuperMulti DVD Burner with LightScribeGraphics NVidia GeForce 9800GT 512MBOperating System Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit SP1Shared Video Memory 2303MBSpeakers HD Audio, 8 Speaker SurroundIntegrated WiFi Wireless LAN 802.11b/g/nFireWire (IEEE 1394) 1 Front 1 BackPower Supply 460 WProcessor Cache 6MB L2 CacheSytem Bus 1333MHz Front Side BusOther 15 in 1 memory card reader 6 USB 2.0 ports 2 Firewire portsIt's only 2.5 GHz - so would it still handle some of the newer games out today that are recommending 3 GHz machines etc.?Should I look at something different or changing something in the above setup?Thanks.Paul.

IMHO the the video card is weak as is the PSU.

Thanks. Anyone else?

Hi Paul,It all depends on the settings of sliders in FSX and the screen resolution you are aiming for.But the first and most imported rule is to get the fastest processor you can afford. Regards,Hans.

Hello Paul,I use an HP m8120n with a Q6600 and a 8800GTX, you should be just fine with a 9800GT ! :( the psu is also ok for a 9800Gt, if you change for a bigger card like 280 GTX you will have to upgrade it because of mainly for a second power connector for the bigger card.Vista 64 is great, 750 gb hard drive.. i have 2 320gb in Raid 0 setup, after trying a dedicated drive for FSX and OS on the other, i found a Raid setup a little faster but especially smoother ! :( In our household, we use 6 hp computers, mainly when i upgrade, the wife and kids benefit it LOL! every time i want to build my own, HP has a model with the specs i need, cheaper than a home built ! :( Have fun...Alain

If you are primarily going to use the system for FS9 it will be more than adequate.

Forgot to indicate i use FSX at pretty high settings with decent frame rates, FS9 still installed on a USB drive mainly for PSS Concorde. Gee i miss this plane in FSX :( Alain

I'm no expert but I think if your mainly going to use FS9 you would be better off with a dual core with a higher clock rate. FS9 will only use 1 of the 4 cores (it was written before multi-core processors and therefore cannot use the extra core(s)) and is very dependant on CPU rate for frame rates. I use an 8500 dual core (at 3.16Ghz) with a 9600 GPU and FS9 runs excellent. Most of the time it is at 60fps (locked to the refresh rate of the monitor, if I unlock it and can get over 150fps depending on the scenery) but it will drop to as low as 30fps if I approach a high detail airport in the Virtual Cockpit of the PMDG 737. Of course, you may have other software that you need to run and a quad core may be more beneficial. Something to think about.

I, too, would recommend a higher PSU. In fact, NVIDIA recommends the 9800 GT itself get at least 400 W of power, so you're cutting it pretty close. As for the video card, it's not bad, as it's just a rebranded 8800 GT, but for FS9, it's more than good enough. Everything else looks pretty good!But right now, I'm looking into one of the 9800 GTX+ cards, as I've heard from quite a few websites that it's a very powerful card when it comes to FS.Regards,

System specs look fine, but as others have noted the quad-core isn't going to do anything for FS9. You'd be better off with a higher-clocked dual-core. Also, the power supply is fine. OEM PSUs are tested and certified on a different level than your average consumer PSU. OEMs design every system with the proper amount of cooling and power for every component that is installed. It's not like you can go on HP's web configurator and build an SLI GTX 280 system with a 300W PSU. Components are matched in the configurator from a database of *TESTED* part configurations. The reason Nvidia (and ATi) recommend PSUs with such high Wattage ratings is because of all the cheapskate 3rd party PSU manufacturers that take 300W PSUs, tweak the delivery of the 3.3 and 5V rails, and use this to increase the overall Wattage rating. The problem with this is that all the major power-draw components draw power from the 12V line. If you dig deeper into these recommendations you'll see that they're actually recommending a specific amperage on the 12V line. The overall Wattage rating is just a catch-all to make sure people with ultra-cheap PSUs don't try to run a powerful video card and end up frying their system.