I was eagerly awaiting FSX and have been saving up my money. After reading all the bad posts about FSX, I have decided to build a pc just for FS9. Can you guys point me in the right direction as far as the minimum system I can build to get 25-30 fps average. My current system will no longer run FS9 and the add-ons I like. I want to be able to use 2 monitors. I want to be able to use Squakbox, FS Passengers, payware aircraft and megascenery. The system I have in mind is listed below, tell me what you think.MB - Asus A8N-SLI CPU - AMD Athlon 64 4000+HD - Seagate 250GB 7200RPM 8MB ATAVC - ATI Radeon X1600 Pro/512MB DDR2/PCI Express/DVI/VGA/TV OutMEM - Ultra 1024MB PC3200 DDR 400MHz MemoryI can get this for under $700.00 from Tiger Direct

I'm with you -- I was also intending to build a box for FSx - using a Dual Core 6800, PCie SLI . But it seems to me that even that would not give me a satisfactory result, so, I am still enjoying FS9 very much and haven't really used many downloads addons that I already have . So I will also build a much less expensive AMD 4000 system - using my existing AGP card. I think it will perform a lot better than my current AMD 2400 system and who knows what will happen over the next 3 years.Barry

I noticed the biggest difference on my machine after adding a second stick of ram. Making it 2gigs total. I also purchased a second hardrive dedicated and partitioned for FS9 alone which is also a big help. those are the most important things I can say. The other hardware on your list of specs should do just fine.Hope this helps,CyberSimmer

Good idea. I agree with the idea's of 2 harddrives (you then install the system on C: and FS to harddrive D: ). Also agree on the 2 Gigs of memory best to buy it all in one go.With the current FS-X liking fast single cores who knows your new machine might give you some great bush flying in FS-X.Like your choice of video card, lots of texture mem.All together you will have a very nice hardware package. Its a real shame that FS-X wasn't targeted at this kind of hardware (lets say all sliders on medium and you get 18 fps in all situations). It would be a whole different ballgame then.

Thanks guys for taking the time to answer my questions. This is a great place to find people in the know.

>I noticed the biggest difference on my machine after adding a>second stick of ram. Making it 2gigs total. I also purchased aI think I have always heard that 2 G RAM is overkill on FS9.

>VC - ATI Radeon X1600 Pro/512MB DDR2/PCI Express/DVI/VGA/TVYou might consider a card with DDR3 memory.

If someone is building a computer for ONLY flight sim there were some threads in the FSX forum regarding "Memory Usage".One recommended 3 and 4 gigs of ram. That same person said they saw big improvements by switching "Memory Usage" from "Program" to "System Cache". A lot of people saw improvements with this technic and they only had 2 gigs of ram. Switching from "Program" to "System Cache" has been mentioned previously with FS9 tweaking. There were a few postings advising caution when doing this tweak with your computer. I haven't done it because of these postings and my lack of expertise in computers. It seems the concerns were about corrupt data being cached and reused somehow.It seems if your computer was only used for Flight Sim and not a storage place for personal data it could be most efficiently run using "System Cache" on a processor that most people have.Again, there are voices of caution about using this tweak when many people have posted that they have been using "System Cache" for "Memory Usage" for years. Daryll