Another 2 cents, Greg.. I hear your pain, but another gpu won't fix your problem. After using ATI since the late 1980's I went to nVidia about 18months ago because ATI could not support the TripleHead2Go. I haven't looked back. I've been running a 8900GTX (old, isn't it?..) for around a year, now, and it worked fine with the Core2Duo e6600, o/c'd to 3.2 gig. - but I couldn't run heavy clouds, airline and road traffic around KSEA all at the same time.. - especially with the Leonardo Maddog.This has bugged me for the longest time, and so I took the plunge three/four weeks ago, with the i7. I didn't change the gpu - just went to Win 7 in performance mode, studied how to oc and did just that. 20 x 200, and she now runs at 4 gig Prime stable - and I just came back from flying that KJFK scenario with the stock 747, 3840x1024x16, Aniso, AA, Gl.Text max, LOD large, Mesh comp. 100, Mesh Res. 5m, Text Res 30cm, Water H1.x, Land Text Det checked, Scen Comp very dense, A/G very dense, Sp. Effects Max, Airline Tr. 34, GA Tr. 100, Road 35, Cloud Cov Max, C.Draw 60 m. Fair Weather selected (ASA&REX) 5/10 cover, day. FPS is locked at 25 and she's at 24.9 or 25 solid. This was startup and climb out turning toward Manhatten. Perfectly fluid.The sim doesn't care about the gpu: it needs cpu cycles, and this has proven it for me. The rig cost me $1300 Can. - not $4000 that some have quoted here. (I could have purchased the i7-920 for half the price of the 950 and it o/c's every bit as well.)

First of all... what is this "performance mode" you speak of in Windows 7?? I've been a user since build 7000 and never heard anything about it, and a google search doesn't bring anything up, and least not readily. If there really is a "performance mode" I'd like to know about it, mostly because since I upgraded to windows 7, I've noticed a drop in performance... Where I am getting 9-11 fps in my test here, I used to get 16-25 fps in Vista before I upgraded to Win 7 Beta.Now, second, and this is where I am right now, is that I just did overclock my CPU and my RAM and got ZERO benefit from the process. I got nearly a full gigahertz extra processor speed and pushed the RAM above its design limit WITHOUT ANY real performance gain in FSX. So, considering 3.6GHz wasn't enough (which is recommended hardware btw), I can't see it being worthwhile to spend $800+ to get a new motherboard, processor, and ram just so I can put it at 4GHz.I may agree with you that the video card might not matter so much, but I'm still stuck trying to find any other culprit here... I've set up my settings and fsx.cfg according to a very good guideline that many people use, I've overclocked the system well beyond its design specs, and I've still not gotten so much as an extra frame out of the game. This means one of two things is happening. Either 1) the graphics card is the real bottleneck and thus, changing the graphics card might just fix the problem, or 2) there is something else going wrong somewhere that I can't put my finger on, and that no one here has managed to suggest. The reality is, if a faster processor was going to fix my machine, then the overclock would have done it, and to be honest, the fact that we couldn't get it to really open up on my friend's machine, which is arguably built for FSX ($4000 gold standard... though he didn't pay that much I don't think...), makes me wonder if its not something else in the mix, especially since he's got the 5870, which has already been recommended a couple of times...I really wish there was a diagnostic tool for FSX that you could run in the background to tell you where things are getting hung up, but I doubt anyone will come up with something like that any time soon. It would solve a lot of people's headaches though...

"High performance" setting in Windows 7:Open Power Options in ControlpanelSelect a powerplan = High performanceAnother thing:Try "Set Priority" to "High" in FSX.exe @ Processes (Windows Task Manager)In FSX "Settings" - "General" - unmark "Pause on task switch" boxBe sure that Aero is turned off when running FSXHave a look at these:http://205.252.250.26/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.p...=1208959973/0#0http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=29041I can recommend this tool to make Win7 more fit:http://yamicsoft.com/windows7manager/index.htmlA fast way to close down services when gaming:http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.htmlWin7 is def. better than Vista, but still, XP 64 is THE OS for FSX IMO!Good luck

Newegg:-ASUS P6T WS Revolution mobo $339.00Intel i7-920 Proc. $289.99Antec TP750 (or gbetter) $119.99OCZ OCZ3G1600LV6GK $129.99Total $879 plus tax. = Another $400 than your original $300 and you'll have a system that will easily do 4.0 gig and blow the sox off that quad you have now - even keeping the gpu. My gpu is the 8900GTX which is two years old - and it still displays beautifully. The i7 is the secret.