Folks,I am a novice hardware guy with a 5 yr old homebuilt PC looking to upgrade my system to be able to run FS9 and ROF smoothly, with the unrealistic (?) goal of most sliders max'd. I currently run FS9 with UT, BEV, and some FSGenesis locked at 28 FPS, and run into slideshow effects in dense metro areas flying birds like the RealAir Scout and Wings of Power warbirds, etc. I really need advice here, and know that I will have to buy a new graphics card, memory, and upgrade the processor, at the very least. Also, is it best to go AMD or Intel? My current basic specs are:AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+ 1 GB RAM NVIDIA GeForce 6800 256 MBXP Pro 5.1 SP3Thaks for any advice you can provide!Arne

The first thing you wanna do is set a budget.So what's your budget?

The first thing you wanna do is set a budget.So what's your budget?

Probably in the neigborhood of $500-$1000, but I really have no good idea, since it's been awhile since I have had to price any of this stuff. I am hoping to keep costs down hoping that my current monitor, tower, power supply, etc. are adequate.

With that budget you should be set! At the moment Intel processors are superior to AMD.If you can supply your own monitor, tower it really does cut the costs. But your power supply will probably not be sufficient (what do you have?)System 1:i7 860 299$Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 249$GTX275 1792mb 289$Some ddr3 PC-16000 or PC-14400 memory sticks for about 100$Corsair 750TX 750W 119$-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------1056$Now you can overclock the i7 860 really good. And it's more better than the i7 920 than worse.

Folks,I am a novice hardware guy with a 5 yr old homebuilt PC looking to upgrade my system to be able to run FS9 and ROF smoothly, with the unrealistic (?) goal of most sliders max'd. I currently run FS9 with UT, BEV, and some FSGenesis locked at 28 FPS, and run into slideshow effects in dense metro areas flying birds like the RealAir Scout and Wings of Power warbirds, etc. I really need advice here, and know that I will have to buy a new graphics card, memory, and upgrade the processor, at the very least. Also, is it best to go AMD or Intel? My current basic specs are:AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+ 1 GB RAM NVIDIA GeForce 6800 256 MBXP Pro 5.1 SP3Thaks for any advice you can provide!Arne

You could go for a Core 2 system for hundreds less. For a nice quad core setup you could spend as low as $500-$700 dollars with a very nice graphics card. My signature system runs ROF and FS9 without a single hiccup. FSX runs like it should, too.