Dusting off Pentium 4 3.0 gig

[Guest Mendota]

FSX is running fine on my Mac Book Pro with Vista under Boot Camp, but I would like to have a proper desktop with a large monitor. I have an old Pentium 4 3.0 gig with an ATI Radeon 9800 128 MB video card running Windows XP. In the day it ran FS9 pretty well. Is FSX likely to do well on it? What should I consider improving? I don't want to have to buy a new computer unless I have to.Thanks, Tim

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

FSX is running fine on my Mac Book Pro with Vista under Boot Camp, but I would like to have a proper desktop with a large monitor. I have an old Pentium 4 3.0 gig with an ATI Radeon 9800 128 MB video card running Windows XP. In the day it ran FS9 pretty well. Is FSX likely to do well on it? What should I consider improving? I don't want to have to buy a new computer unless I have to.Thanks, Tim

You are not going to be happy running FSX on that system... FS9 yes, FSX no...As you can see if you browse this forum, you need a Core Duo or Quad system at 3 GHz, a 512MB video card, and 2 GB RAM before FSX starts to run well.

[ryanbatc 12,846]

Ditto.....don't waste your time with FSX...3GHz is only a start, 4GHz is what you want to aim for great performance.

[Ted Striker 338]

Tim,I have P4 3.0 with a Nvidia 6800gt and 2 mb of ddr400 Ram. With this I can run FS9 with all sliders maxed except cloud distance, which is set at minimum. I can run FSX with an average of 20 FPS with no traffic, medium detail on clouds, sparse autogen, 1x water, and medium scenery settings. I have installed GEX, Ultimate Terrain X, FSG Mesh, and ASG graphics. These improved the graphics immensely without hurting the performance. The default FS clouds had so much of a performance hit that I had to fly with clear skies all the time. I installed the lowest resolution clouds that ASG offers, which allowed me to use some weather. With these low settings and without the addons FSX was not any better than FS9 except in places like Martinique. With these addons it is enjoyable to use. I have similar add-ons for FS9. If I want more traffic, more complex airlines, and to fly in storms I go back to FS9. If I want to fly around by myself in scattered clouds with higher ground scenery resolution, I use FSX. Blurry scenery tiles? Usually in dense urban areas, not much in rural areas. I have wanted to build a new computer for over a year now but have not had the time to do the research. Unfortunately you need to be somehwat of a computer engineer these days to stay in this hobby. I would never recommend anyone to buy or build a P4 3.0 for FSX, it is bare minimum. But if you have one already, yes you can use FSX but the settings will need to be so low it won't look much better than FS9. One other thing I almost forgot, you'll need to have at least 2mb of RAM. 1mb was sufficient when I built the computer for FS9. I had to add another mb when I installed FSX to get rid of massive sttuters that I was experiencing. So if you don't have 2mb, be prepared to buy some ram or get a faster computer. If you want FSX to look and perform a lot better than FS9, then you will have to get a new computer,......me too...one of these days.Ted

[Guest Mendota]

I am kind of at a loss... I am enjoying FSX on my laptop (which is no super-computer) and am now wondering what I gained by switching. Oh well, too late to look back. I will probably help the economy by getting a decent desktop after I save up awhile.