Hello,I'm thinking of buying a new system in mid July that will allow me to play FS9 with all sliders maxed out and a bunch of vital addons with no hiccups. Reading from the hardware section, however it seems that this will not be possible with FSX. My budget is roughly 800$ CAD which I think is reasonable for an okay system to run FSX. I got a few questions that hopefully somebody can answer. 1. It seems that the q6600 cpu is of common choice for FSX - is this true and if so what is the most desirable speed to overclock it too? 2. Would the Core 2 Duo e8400 be of better choice? 3. Would GTX260 be of better choice compared to the 9800GTX(+) or is there a better graphics card in the GTX260 price range, but better than GTX260? 4. Is it better to install a 64 bit system, specifically vista and would FS9 run in vista64 and can FSX take advantage of dx10? 5. 4GB of DDR2 is relatively cheap these days, but is it worth the cost to buy DDR3 and will it run at its full potential (highest megahertz) without an i7 CPU?6. And lastly would an overclocked q6600 along with GTX260 allow me to run FSX at around 20-30 fps, with activex weather, pmdg 747x, traffic maxed out, medium graphics, at night in fsdreams KJFK - if not, what kind of quality graphics would I expect with the above addons and maxed out traffic?Thank you,Igor.

Anyone? :(

1,2) For FS9 the most important thing is to buy a CPU which carries out the most instructions per second. This roughly breaks down into instructions per clock cycle x number of clock cycles. At the current time, Intel CPUs carry out more instructions per clock cycle than do AMD CPUs. Therefore, if you buy a highly clocked Intel CPU you will get the most performance for FS9. Right now the Core 2 Duo E8600 is the highest clocked Intel CPU (short of a Core i7 975 Extreme Edition chip) and that would likely be your best bet. If that doesn't fit in your budget with the rest of your planned parts, you could step down to an E8400 or E8500. Regardless of which chip you choose, I do recommend overclocking if you're comfortable dabbling in the BIOS.3) For FS9 it really doesn't matter once you get up to about 8800 GT level. Anything faster than that is overkill unless you're running extremely high resolutions and levels of AA.4) 64-bit is generally better but is unlikely to provide any specific benefit to FS9. It is more beneficial to FSX. 5) Not unless you're overclocking by *a lot*, especially not for a dual core running FS9. Quads running FSX are another matter altogether. 6) Maybe on medium graphics. Maybe.